Huh, more questions than answers there. Not a biologist but I’ve got to think there’s an easier way to study the surface transmission part than with live virus. If we’re assuming that: the virus is basically inert on surfaces and can’t move or divide or do much of note; transmission is just a function of how much intact virus makes it to the recipients tissues; then that should let us factor out studying how a ball of proteins about that size move through the environment from actually infecting people. And there’s got to be an easier way to test—add a marker to something that’s still a decent virus analog, like splice in a florescent protein or something that you can just see at a glance “how much”, but it’s still a protein that can denature at a similar rate. I’ve heard of demos like that using glitter or chemicals to show surface transmission, but that doesn’t capture degradation and has too many other differences.
The degree to which the virus is potentially degrading in the environment just sitting there is also a big confounder—how much did it degrade while waiting for the test vs before you took the sample? So something that let’s you test instantly seems worth a little extra fuss.
Huh, more questions than answers there. Not a biologist but I’ve got to think there’s an easier way to study the surface transmission part than with live virus. If we’re assuming that: the virus is basically inert on surfaces and can’t move or divide or do much of note; transmission is just a function of how much intact virus makes it to the recipients tissues; then that should let us factor out studying how a ball of proteins about that size move through the environment from actually infecting people. And there’s got to be an easier way to test—add a marker to something that’s still a decent virus analog, like splice in a florescent protein or something that you can just see at a glance “how much”, but it’s still a protein that can denature at a similar rate. I’ve heard of demos like that using glitter or chemicals to show surface transmission, but that doesn’t capture degradation and has too many other differences.
The degree to which the virus is potentially degrading in the environment just sitting there is also a big confounder—how much did it degrade while waiting for the test vs before you took the sample? So something that let’s you test instantly seems worth a little extra fuss.