![You're Unlikely to Get COVID From Contaminated Hospital Surfaces You're Unlikely to Get COVID From Contaminated Hospital Surfaces](https://dailysciencedigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/hospital1.jpg)
1) A study has confirmed that any contamination by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, on hospital surfaces are not likely to be infectious. The researchers were able to recover almost complete sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus DNA from surface swabs of hospital surfaces.
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2) Samples were collected during the first wave of COVID (April 2020) and second wave (August 2020). Despite significantly more patients during the second wave, only 2 percent of swabs tested positive in August, compared with 11 percent in April.
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3) The study showed that using genomic sequencing, SARS-CoV-2 could be detected even from samples that were negative using common PCR tests. The study also showed that even the gene sequence of SARS-CoV-2 from hospital surfaces were almost fully intact, the virus was not infectious.
The take-home message is that it is unlikely you can catch COVID from hospital surfaces contaminated with the SARS-CoV-2 coronvirus, even though their DNA sequence is near-intact.
This study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Journal source: PLOS ONE
SARS-CoV-2 detection and genomic sequencing from hospital surface samples collected at UC Davis
June 24, 2021