Risk of Covid-19 from surfaces is extremely low – CDC

So you know how we have been told to obsessively keep surfaces clean, because of the risk o catching Covid-19?

Well new data has come out from the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), that will blow your mind.

Here is what the CDC says, “Each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.”

That is 0.01 percent.

This comes after analysing a lot of data from surface survival times and how people caught Covid-19.

On survival times, they said, “On porous surfaces, studies report inability to detect viable virus within minutes to hours; on non-porous surfaces, viable virus can be detected for days to weeks.”

The CDC added “that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass.”

The qualifier though was that they did not take into consideration real world environment, where viral load in respiratory droplets differ. Other factors such as ventilation and changing environmental conditions can change things.

In lab environments, they try to optimise the recovery of viruses from surfaces (e.g., purposefully swabbing the surface multiple times or soaking the contaminated surface in viral transport medium before swabbing). When accounting for both surface survival data and real-world transmission factors, the risk of fomite transmission after a person with COVID-19 has been in an indoor space is minor after 3 days (72 hours), regardless of when it was last cleaned.

“Surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low,” the CDC they confirmed.