You’ve Got Mail. Will You Get the Coronavirus?
Quotes from article:
Some government agencies seem concerned that all of that circulating paper might be a potential vector. In early February, when COVID-19 was still just “the coronavirus” — and, for most Americans, still someone else’s problem — China’s central bank announced that it would quarantine the country’s cash, to prevent the disease from spreading from one person to another on money. The government collected bank notes from Hubei, the worst-hit province, and then sanitized the stacks of bills, either by baking them at a high temperature or bathing them in ultraviolet rays. The newly laundered cash was then kept in isolation for seven to 14 days before being rereleased into the banking system.
A few weeks later, the U.S. Federal Reserve began quarantining dollar bills repatriated from Asia, holding them for seven to 10 days before allowing them to re-enter the domestic financial system. Bank notes are made of cotton pulp, not wood fiber, but still: Why sanitize money and not mail?
Representatives of the big three package deliverers in the United States — U.P.S., FedEx and the Postal Service — insisted there is no need. “The C.D.C. has advised that there is a low risk of transmission on packages,” said Matthew O’Conner, a spokesman for U.P.S. FedEx, in a statement, said. “The guidance from the W.H.O. is that the likelihood of an infected person contaminating commercial goods is low, and the risk of catching the virus that causes COVID-19 from a package that has been moved, traveled, and exposed to different conditions and temperature is also low.”
David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, noted that the surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, along with the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, has “indicated that there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through the mail.”
This is because many scientists think it is quite unlikely that you can catch the coronavirus by touching a surface that has the virus on it and subsequently touching your own mouth or nose. (
One review of scientific publications on the subject concluded that hand washing seems to cut the risk of respiratory infection by a mere 16 percent — but added that the studies examined were of poor quality and more research was urgently needed.)
The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment — Germany’s equivalent of the F.D.A. — advises that while the virus could, theoretically, be transmitted through this kind of “smear” infection, as opposed to the standard “droplet” infection, there have been no known cases in which individuals have caught the coronavirus by touching a contaminated surface and then transferring the virus to their mouth or nose. Then again, contact transmission is notoriously
difficult to study and document.
A paper
published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week shed more light on the subject. A group of researchers from the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, misted virus particles into a rotating drum and studied how long the floating particles survived on various surfaces. They found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus survived for up to 24 hours on cardboard — three times longer than its cousin, the original SARS.
“In that light, you might expect the virus to remain viable for hours but probably not days on mail,” said James Lloyd-Smith, one of the study’s authors. “But there are important caveats.”
Among these: The study specifically looked at aerosolized virus particles, rather than the fine droplets that infected people emit with each cough or sneeze. The line between aerosols and droplets is fuzzy, but, broadly, droplets are bigger and settle more quickly, while aerosols are smaller and float for longer.
