In other words, Delta lasts longer in the air than the original strain (which itself could last in the air for as long as three hours)
This is tangential, but it’s been fascinating to me to watch the spread of that “three hours” factoid. I believe it originally comes from this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1.full.pdf (Note that “HCoV-19” was referring to what is now designated “SARS-CoV-2″, i.e. COVID-19.)
I very gently criticized it at the time for having a quite misleading abstract, regarding the “three hours” figure:
This abstract, as far as I can tell, is where the “three hours” factoid originated, which has now become gospel that appears on public health pages like your link above. In reality, the abstract said they detected the virus in aerosols for “up to three hours” because that was the duration of the experiment. It’s obvious from graphs, as well as their computed half-life figure—which is coincidentally pretty close to three hours—that if they had continued the experiment, they would have kept detecting viable virus for a multiple of that time. (Of course, this figure is also kind of meaningless anyway, since the initial quantity of virus they’re experimenting on was arbitrary! Only the half-life is really meaningful, but that doesn’t make good headlines.)
It feels very weird to me to have “been there at the beginning” for this. I have no specific qualifications for interpreting this paper, beyond being smart and careful. It’s a little depressing (but that’s the COVID story.)
(I would love for someone to correct my story here, and find some other explanation for where this factoid came from, or argue that I’m wrong about it being misleading to the point of error. I really don’t like this story or what it implies.)
This is tangential, but it’s been fascinating to me to watch the spread of that “three hours” factoid. I believe it originally comes from this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1.full.pdf (Note that “HCoV-19” was referring to what is now designated “SARS-CoV-2″, i.e. COVID-19.)
I very gently criticized it at the time for having a quite misleading abstract, regarding the “three hours” figure:
https://twitter.com/gwillen/status/1237854407007457280 https://twitter.com/DrNeeltje/status/1237895661967642626 https://twitter.com/gwillen/status/1237896626355593221
This abstract, as far as I can tell, is where the “three hours” factoid originated, which has now become gospel that appears on public health pages like your link above. In reality, the abstract said they detected the virus in aerosols for “up to three hours” because that was the duration of the experiment. It’s obvious from graphs, as well as their computed half-life figure—which is coincidentally pretty close to three hours—that if they had continued the experiment, they would have kept detecting viable virus for a multiple of that time. (Of course, this figure is also kind of meaningless anyway, since the initial quantity of virus they’re experimenting on was arbitrary! Only the half-life is really meaningful, but that doesn’t make good headlines.)
It feels very weird to me to have “been there at the beginning” for this. I have no specific qualifications for interpreting this paper, beyond being smart and careful. It’s a little depressing (but that’s the COVID story.)
(I would love for someone to correct my story here, and find some other explanation for where this factoid came from, or argue that I’m wrong about it being misleading to the point of error. I really don’t like this story or what it implies.)
So 3 hours was too low even for the original strain??? Jesus, no wonder so many cases are untraceable.