Virus does not spread easily from contaminated surfaces
The coronavirus primarily spreads from person to person and not easily from a contaminated surface. That’s the takeaway from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which this month updated its “How COVID-19 Spreads” website.
The revised guidance now states, “The virus spreads easily between people.” It also notes that the coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, “is spreading very easily and sustainably between people.”
Under a new heading “The virus does not spread easily in other ways” the agency explains that touching contaminated objects or surfaces does not appear to be a significant mode of transmission. The same is true for exposure to infected animals.
CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said Thursday that the revisions were the product of an internal review and “usability testing.”
“Our transmission language has not changed,” Nordlund said. “COVID-19 spreads mainly through close contact from person to person.” The virus travels through the droplets a person produces when talking or coughing, the CDC website says. An individual does not need to feel sick or show symptoms to spread the submicroscopic virus. Close contact means within about 6 feet, the distance at which a sneeze flings heavy droplets.
“Direct contact with people has the highest likelihood of getting infected — being close to an infected person, rather than accepting a newspaper or a FedEx guy dropping off a box,” said virologist Vincent Munster, a researcher at the
Virus Ecology Section of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases facility in Hamilton, Mont.
Munster and his colleagues showed in laboratory experiments that the virus remained potentially viable on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on plastic and metal surfaces for up to three days. But the virus typically degrades within hours when outside a host.
The change to the CDC website, without formal announcement or explanation, concerns Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University School of Public
Health.
“A persistent problem in this pandemic has been lack of clear messaging from governmental leadership, and this is another unfortunate example of that trend,” she said. “It could even have a detrimental effect on hand hygiene and encourage complacency about physical distancing or other measures.”
Rasmussen said if people find comfort in “quarantining” their mail or wiping down plastic packaging with disinfectant, “there’s no harm in doing that,” Rasmussen said. “Just don’t wipe down food with disinfectant.”