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How Long Can The Novel Coronavirus Survive On Surfaces And In The Air?
A New Study Shows That SARS-CoV-2 Can Linger in The Air For Hours And On Some Materials For Days
March 19, 2020
AT A TIME when many people have taken to washing hands and sanitizing the objects they hold dear—frequently—a pesky question has loomed. How long does the SARS-CoV-2 virus stick around? A new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the first to examine the lifespan of the virus on common surfaces, offers some answers.
Like the common cold, Covid-19 spreads through virus-laden droplets of moisture released when an infected person coughs, sneezes or merely exhales. A team of researchers, including scientists from America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, simulated how an infected individual might spread the virus in the air and on plastic, cardboard, stainless steel and copper. They then measured how long the virus remained infectious in those environments.
They found that SARS-CoV-2 stays more stable on plastic and steel than on cardboard or copper. Traces of the virus were detected on plastic and steel up to three days after contamination. SARS-CoV-2 survived on cardboard for up to one day. On copper, the most hostile surface tested, it lasted just four hours (see chart). In the air, the team found that the virus can stick around for at least three hours. In the air, as elsewhere, the virus’s ability to infect people diminished sharply over time. In the air, for instance, its estimated median half-life—the time it takes for half of the virus particles to become inactive—was just over an hour. And the levels of the virus that do remain in the air are not high enough to pose a risk to most people who are not in the immediate vicinity of an infected person.
These findings are likely to assuage some fears. Homebound consumers worried about contagion from cardboard delivery boxes may have less to worry about the next time Amazon rings (unless they are used to same-day delivery). At the same time, the findings will amplify concerns about airborne transmission, which some experts had not considered possible. The research may change the way medical workers interact with infected patients, who with close contact may transmit the virus onto protective gear.
Why the virus can survive longer on some surfaces rather than others still remains something of a mystery. Maybe it has to do with the consistency of the object playing host to the virus. Cardboard, of course, is much more porous than steel, plastic or copper. But the authors noted that there was more variation in their experiment for cardboard than for other surfaces, and the results should be interpreted with caution. No doubt consumers are used to treating their surroundings that way by now.
TED 2015: Bill Gates Warns on Future Disease Epidemic
Bill Gates used his time at Ted to call for the world to prepare for the next health epidemic
Bill Gates used his time at Ted to call for the world to prepare for the next health epidemic
By Jane Wakefield | Technology reporter, Vancouver
19 March 2015
The world needs to prepare for the next major health crisis, Bill Gates has told delegates at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference.
While Ebola seems to be being kept under control currently, next time "we may not be so lucky" the Microsoft co-founder warned.
He said that there were plenty of technology tools that could be used to contain the spread of a virus.
And, he added, governments should learn from how nations prepare for war.
"Nato plays war games to check that people are well-trained and prepared. Now we need germ games," he said.
He also called for a reserve "medical corps" similar to the reserve armies that civilians can join.
Technology can play a big role in helping prevent the spread of a virus, he told the Ted audience.
The proliferation of mobile phones means that citizens can easily report where disease breaks out and satellite mapping can quickly collate where the problem areas are.
Meanwhile, advances in biology have drastically cut the time it takes to develop vaccines for new viruses
During the Ebola crisis, technology firms such as IBM contributed tracking systems that allowed the authorities to create detailed maps of outbreaks based on text messages from citizens.
Bill Gates has long had an interest in global problems such as poverty and disease and the Gates Foundation, which he set up with his wife, has contributed millions to help solve the issues.
The fight against Ebola
Delegates were invited to try on the protective gear doctors and nurses fighting Ebola must wear
During the recent Ebola crisis, the Gates Foundation shipped vests lined with ice-packs to help doctors and nurses, who must cover themselves in protective gear, keep cool.
At the Ted conference, a mock-up of an Ebola hospital showed how tough life is for the doctors and nurses who work in them. Delegates were invited to try on a protective suit, perform tasks in it and take it off without allowing any part of it to touch the skin.
More long term it is vital that strong health systems are built in poorer countries, Mr. Gates said.
Meanwhile, the world needs to be prepared for the next epidemic.
"We can get ready, we don't need to panic. We don't need to hoard cans of spaghetti and hide in the basement," he told the Ted audience.
"If there is any good to have come out of the Ebola crisis it is that it has acted as an early warning, a wake-up call," he added.
All Photo’s by REUTERS
Will We Be Saved by Vertical Farming?
Vertical farming uses carefully controlled growth conditions to give yields far higher than normal agriculture. As the world goes into lockdown as a result of COVID-19, many are fearful about the reliability of food supplies in urban areas. Vertical farming may well be a solution – although not in the immediate short-term
Will We Be Saved by Vertical Farming?
March 20, 2020
Vertical farming uses carefully controlled growth conditions to give yields far higher than normal agriculture.
As the world goes into lockdown as a result of COVID-19, many are fearful about the reliability of food supplies in urban areas. Vertical farming may well be a solution – although not in the immediate short-term.
Vertical farming is the practice of growing plants indoors under fully controlled environmental conditions in many stacked layers, using artificial lighting instead of relying on the sun. By tuning the growing environment to the exact needs of the plant and using soil-free growing techniques, vertical farming can achieve yields hundreds of times higher than conventional agriculture, 365 days a year and without requiring pesticides.
Supporters of vertical farming claim it could revolutionize global food production, practically eliminating food miles by enabling crop growth right next to urban population centers, paving the way for the future of smart cities. At the moment, fruit and vegetables often travel thousands of miles to reach consumers, losing freshness and quality along the way and increasing the risk of contamination.
Investors are responding enthusiastically, with the sector raising over $1 billion in funding since 2015. High profile investments include New Jersey-based start-up AeroFarms raising $100 million in 2019 to expand its aeroponic growing facilities, and Californian start-up Plenty raising $200 million in 2017 in a funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, along with backers including Jeff Bezos and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt. Across the Pacific, the industry is already well-established – in Japan, there are over 200 vertical farms currently operating, with industry leader Spread Co. Ltd. producing 30,000 heads of lettuce every day in its highly automated Techno Farm Keihanna plant.
However, despite this optimistic picture, the industry is facing challenges. The sector is littered with bankruptcies as companies struggle with the power costs of maintaining a controlled environment 24/7 and the difficulties of coordinating the labor-intensive process of running a vertical farm. Nevertheless, companies remain optimistic, with advances in lighting and automation technology helping to shape the future of indoor growing.
A new report from market intelligence firm IDTechEx, “Vertical Farming: 2020-2030”, discusses the state of the vertical farming industry, the key technological enablers and the economics of the process compared with conventional agriculture, identifying the keys to success in this fledgling industry.
Based on interviews with key stakeholders and extensive analysis, the report evaluates the current markets and forecasts the future of the global vertical farming industry.
To find out more, visit www.IDTechEx.com/VertFarm
US: New York City - COVID-19 Update - All Schools Closed
Clearly, we are in exceptional times with COVID-19. As a business, we need to think differently. Our priority is to ensure our team’s safety as well as the safety of the wider community. The single best way to do that is to enforce social distancing. The simplest way to do that is for everyone to work from home
Clearly, we are in exceptional times with COVID-19. As a business, we need to think differently.
Our priority is to ensure our team’s safety as well as the safety of the wider community. The single best way to do that is to enforce social distancing. The simplest way to do that is for everyone to work from home.
However, we are also a company that produces food. We have farms and farmers, and we can grow food to feed people. No one knows exactly where this situation is heading, but we’re already seeing supermarket shelves emptying in New York. Sooner rather than later, food supply will surely become an issue. So it feels like we have a moral obligation to use the resources we have—skilled farmers and our farm-tech platform—to keep growing food, and to find ways to get that food to as many people as possible.
We have analyzed the situation carefully and determined that there is a way to balance both objectives—i.e. to keep growing food, in a safe way for our team and others. But it requires changes in our operations and the day-to-day workflow on our farms. For example, we have decided to stop the time-intensive and people-intensive task in our current process of packing harvested food into small clam shells, ready for retail distribution. Instead, we are going to pack quickly in bulk bags (as always, with gloves and love).
Any farmers or other staff not absolutely required to manage our temporary, slimmed-down operation at our Brooklyn campus, have been asked to stay at home on full pay.
This week, you will not find Square Roots packaged products on the shelves of retail grocery stores in New York City. Instead, to get the food we grow to people who need it most, we have decided to extend our existing partnership with ReThink Food NYC - who are safely creating meals for those in need from their kitchens in the Navy Yards. On Monday, we are going to donate *all* the food we harvest in Brooklyn to them.
Follow along on our social media for additional updates regarding our New York and Michigan campuses. Stay safe, everyone.
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Democracy, Trust And The Virus
March 15, 2020
This Is A Moment To Be Sanguine.
Read This Letter With That in Mind.
For readers outside of the UK, please note the parochial focus of this particular missive touches on many issues that might be relevant in your country.
[T]he allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.
These are the new guidelines for the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care, written an eon ago on Monday when Italy had 40% fewer cases of coronavirus than as I type these words. (There has been an update reported by the Daily Telegraph, “This is how it is in a war.”)
As COVID19 continues its exponential growth in most countries, the strategies which country select will have a massive impact on the severity outcome of this pandemic. Ignoring science at the top of government is unacceptable. However, science must not equally be a shield under which leaders absolve themselves of their political responsibility.
Writes my friend Nicolas Granatino, in a recent issue of his newsletter, Coronadaily reflecting on the British government’s approach to tackling the epidemic.
Boris Johnson and two senior science advisors delivered an impressive presentation. but their strategy for tackling the spread of the virus is controversial. As is becoming clear, the British government’s approach to handling the pandemic has been understood, in a nutshell, rightly or wrongly, as “let it roll through the population, avoiding tough containment measures because Brits will get bored, and protect the old until enough of us have herd immunity.”
It turns out it is more complicated than that.
Adam Kucharski, the epidemic modeler, author of The Rules of Contagion, and a member of one of the expert groups that comprise SAGE which advises the government, makes it very clear here.
A lot of modellers around the world are working flat out to find best way to minimise impact on population and healthcare. A side effect may end up being herd immunity, but this is merely a consequence of a very tough option - albeit one that may help prevent another outbreak.
Ian Donald, a psychology professor with expertise in anti-microbial resistance points out:
The govt strategy on #Coronavirus is more refined than those used in other countries and potentially very effective. But it is also riskier and based on a number of assumptions. They need to be correct, and the measures they introduce need to work when they are supposed to…
This is probably the best strategy, but they should explain it more clearly. It relies on a lot of assumptions, so it would be good to know what they are - especially behavioural. (emphasis mine.)
Models, even scientific ones, tell different stories, depending on the assumptions you put in. The assumptions are often uncertain and represent judgments & choices. The outputs of models have variances, based on the assumptions you make.
And an epidemiological model is a complex one with many inputs, variables, feedback loops and delays. (See this video here.)
These outputs become scenarios, which are based on your assumptions and judgments. Scenarios which you can navigate and use to explore future possibilities.
How you validate those assumptions is critical. How you select them is critical. How you make those judgments is also critical. It is also a human process that lends itself to argument and debate.
It is not sufficient to say “We are using the best science” and leave it at that. And certainly not in the era of open science, open data, and common tools to foster a healthy critical debate.
In the UK, the government gave us one choice, one approach, “from the science” as a fait-accompli.
But no model works like that. Science doesn't work like that.
Behavioral scientists have challenged one tenet of the British government’s plan: that of behavioral fatigue. Here a stampede of behavior scientists write: (I don’t know what the collective noun for behavioral scientists is. Stampede seemed a reasonable choice)
we are not convinced that enough is known about “behavioural fatigue” or to what extent these insights apply to the current exceptional circumstances. Such evidence is necessary if we are to base a high-risk public health strategy on it.
An abelian of mathematicians has also written to challenge the UK government’s approach.
Science doesn’t work the way Boris Johnson suggested it did.
Especially not in the context of health decisions. Readers will remember part of my tooth fell out a couple of weeks ago. Even my dentist offered me the choice of yet another filling or a crown. Science drove my dentist’s assessment, and I was still offered two choices.
There are discussions, arguments, challenges, disagreements, external trade-offs that went into the final recommendations. But with millions of lives at stake and an entire economy built with and enabling those lives, there needs to be a deeper debate, deeper scrutiny.
The doctors in Lombardy have had to become utilitarians, applying clear criteria of survivability on the decisions they make. I support them--on the front line they have few luxuries.
But the British government is making similar decisions with many more variables, without clearly explaining the choices they faced and the roads they took.
There is no doubt about the capabilities of the Chief Scientific Officer or Chief Medical Officer or the work of epidemiologists in various expert groups. Or the quality of their models. (Although no model is perfect, many are wrong and some may even have catastrophic mistakes in them. Think back to the models driving financial risk in the run-up to the global financial crisis. Remember David Viniar’s bullshit about “twenty-five standard deviation” events?)
It is that the modeling only throws light on a couple of aspects of the problem at hand. The model’s job is to also outline the possible paths of specific political choices.
It was a curious approach by the British government. One which has lost the trust. Yet, as I argued two weeks ago, public health emergencies require public trust.
the current British government, fought its electoral campaign with explicit attacks on the mechanisms of the state that stand outside politics, such as the judiciary and the Civil Service. At a moment when trust is most needed, to manage this burgeoning public health crisis, the government has been involved in a vicious attack on the very institutions that engender that trust.
How do you regain trust?
You can brief journalists and you can get your more articulate ministers to write an article in friendly newspapers. This is an industrial-age approach that might have worked with the poorly-educated, information-starved, under-networked, populace of the 1930s.
In the exponential age, your population is vastly more educated, resource-rich and networked. It has access to pretty much the same international research you do. It has, in many cases, better capabilities than the government can rely on.
And we can look on the Internet and read what is happening in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, China and you name it. We can see what they are doing. The temperature guns. The drive-through testing.
Italy looks like it can flatten the curve.
South Korea (below) is squishing new cases even as it tests vigorously. We can see this because the information is available from reliable sources.
We can hear Andy Slavitt, Obama’s healthcare majordomo, sound the alarm for the impending tsunami.
Nearly 30m of us have read Tomas Pueyo’s “Coronavirus: Why you must act now”. Some will have read the critique of whether “flattening the curve is a delusion.” You might have seen the Washington Post’s visualisations on how flattening the curve works.
Or perhaps you have been following the work of Yanner Bar-Yam and colleagues at the New England Complexity Science Institute whose models suggest “massive testing can stop the coronavirus outbreak” or their earlier work on Ebola contact tracing which has led them to suggest that even low compliance towards travel can stop outbreaks.
Many will wonder how quickly we could administer drugs to stop the cytokine storm that kills many who die of Covid-19. Or could we expand testing of and access to remdesivir, chloroquine or viagra, all of which seem to have some efficacy.
Some will ask whether acting aggressively now to slow the spread could buy time for health capacity to build up, even marginally. Or for Senegal to finish work on its 10-minute PCR test kit, or for us to validate Singapore’s serological tests.
In 2002, most Brits do not sit around doing the Daily Telegraph crossword, sipping tea, eating crumpets, waiting to lap-up the latest announcement from Downing Street on the wireless. So it’s truly bizarre to present a plan (perhaps it is the best??) that is such a massive outlier to the rest of the world and not expect pushback.
Openness, transparency about these types of decisions is a pillar of a democratic society. And it is foolish to think you can get away with a decision like this without someone asking difficult questions. Much more so when scientists are willing to state they disagree with you. And even more so in the era of the Internet. ( Paul Ginsparg demonstrated the value of open access when he launched Arxiv in 1991. Arguably Gutenberg did if even earlier.)
A better approach would be to open the model, to open the assumptions, for constructive discussion in the brief moments we have available, in a way that could catalyze improvements. You still have to lead, as Prime Minister, without question but you have to bring people with you. And we only at most a few weeks before the tsunami hits and our hospitals are, likely, overwhelmed.
Playing with one epidemic simulator, as it happens, helped me better understand Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Witty, the UK government’s advisors rationale. Don’t get hung up on the model simulation I used. It is a toy simulator. Its conclusions are mostly useless. I don’t know what was under the hood. And it almost certainly ignores many of the more nuanced variables and relationships the real models used by SAGE have.
This toy simulator irrelevant except that:
It is clarifying for a citizen to play with a model like this, fiddle with assumptions, run simulations. It helped you understand the trade-offs that we face in tackling this epidemic—and it starts to outline what our personal responsibility and capacities may be.
The trade-offs are complex with non-linear effects of such a baffling nature I can only describe them as counter-intuitive. (Which more shows up the weaknesses in my expertise, more than anything else.)
I have no deep professional expertise on whether these epidemiological models. But I do understand the useful limits of models and can grok that the model is one input into an overall decision. That there are nuances. I do know there are assumptions on which decisions are made. The British government failed to give us their assumptions, the tools and democratic rigor to allow us to come to any kind of conclusion.
They still have a chance to do that. And early signs are that the British Government is demonstrating some pretty creative thinking (especially in enlisting the private sector and ramping up the NHS, our vehicle for universal, socialised medicine.)
But in being clearer and more inclusive in their communications, they might enlist creativity and talent and trust around the country in myriad other ways—not least in our willingness to step up and do the right thing.
What if we are more resilient and self-organizing and willing to clamp down on contact immediately? And will we do, as my community is, to support the vulnerable at a community level? What if we, the people, understand the horrific consequences of widespread promiscuous lunching at the local boozer?
Public health crises require public trust. A crisis like this, as we are learning from Italy, is more like a war. And it will be a long, grinding war, for which citizen trust, forbearance, and participation will be required.
As I went to bed on Saturday night, #boristhebutcher was, perhaps unfairly, trending on the socials. Such is the cost of forgetting about open, transparent, interactive communication that the internet enables.
This is the shape of democracy in the exponential age.
My friend from Shenzhen, six weeks into quarantine, sent me a WhatsApp. I know he won’t mind me sharing it with you: “Covid19 cases going up in Europe. Pls, take care.”
And let me add, keep your distance and WASH YOUR HANDS.
Azeem
P.S. On the point about the economy and its importance during a crisis… we’ll need a healthy economy of sorts to survive this marathon. The economy provides the goods and services that keep our population fed, nourished and healthy, and creates capacity in our health system. This isn’t so much an argument about GDP growth, but more than a healthy economy enables a healthy population and a functioning medical system.
Thanks to Nicolas Granatino, Vishal Gulati, Hampus Jakobsson, Paola Bonomo and many others for discussions that helped with this letter.
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