Live coronavirus found on frozen food packaging in China

theguardian.com

3 pointsbookofjoe2 comments

>Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention isolated live new coronavirus in cold chain food packaging

http://www.chinacdc.cn/yw_9324/202010/t20201017_222144.html

It can infect Vero E6 cells or equivalent, given they said it's "live". But is this enough to infect someone?

The answer is, AFAICS, "unknown". I'm surprised a lot of studies of "virus persistence on surface X" don't (yet) do animal experiments to confirm there's enough to infect something else than cells growing in a monolayer (which don't have physical barriers or other aspecific defense mechanisms).

OTOH, current (scarce) evidence still points at fomite transmission to be not very prevalent at the very least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com