In a significant find, researchers now report that the novel coronavirus can survive in the air for hours in fine particles known as aerosols, and can spread quickly like SARS.
This turns the earlier thinking right on its head thatcoronavirus only spreads from surface and is not present in the air, especiallynear health care settings and hospitals.
Researchers found thatCOVID-19 can be detected up to 3 hours after aerosolization and can infectcells throughout that time period, reports Live Science.
However,the study, posted on the preprint database medRxiv, is still preliminary,because it has not undergone extensive peer-review.
“The authors did receive comments from one prospectivescientific journal, and posted an updated version of the study on March 13reflecting the revisions,” said the report.
“We still don’tknow how high a concentration of viable SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) s needed inpractice to infect a human being, though this is something we are looking tomodel in the future,” study co-author Dylan Morris from PrincetonUniversity, told Live Science.
Aerosols can potentially travel across far greaterdistances. In the current study, the researchers did not examine how farSARS-CoV-2 could conceivably travel through the air.
“More important,even if aerosol transmission can occur, it’s unlikely to be the primary forcedriving the current pandemic,” Morris said.
The current scientific consensus is that most newcoronavirus transmission are via respiratory secretions in the form of largerespiratory droplets on surface.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can last on surfaces potentially several hours, or even days, according to another preprint published by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, Princeton, and the University of California, Los Angeles.