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.
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.
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