What It Takes to Annihilate a Coronavirus
Trying to destroy something that doesn’t live is complicated
Follow Elemental’s ongoing coverage of the coronavirus outbreak here.
Just as there are many different kinds of viruses, there are many different ways to destroy them.
As the spread of the new coronavirus continues, surpassing 70,000 confirmed cases and more than 2,000 deaths, there’s increasing pressure among scientists to figure out how long the virus might survive outside the human body.
How long a virus endures has implications for the scope of the outbreak: It matters for keeping hospital environments safe and minimizing the spread of the virus among people in public spaces.
A review of the scientific literature published last week reported that the family of viruses to which the new coronavirus belongs tend to persist around four days on surfaces at room temperature. Previously, researchers found that the coronavirus behind the SARS outbreak of 2003 could remain infectious on dry surfaces as long as six days. Scientists are now racing to understand how easily this new pathogen — now officially known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) — can spread.
