The BBC’s pandemic coverage has strictly followed what is now known as official science. No questions asked; just report what you are told.
One of the most incredible features of the media coverage has been the ignorance of existing research on respiratory viruses. We use ignorance as a generic term as we are unsure whether the reporters were ignoring the large existing body of knowledge or were ignorant, i.e., did not know it existed.
Now we have the latest fantastic revelation: respiratory viruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2, “survive” for days on certain types of surfaces and foodstuffs, from pastries to canned products.
The news item is from a Food Standard Agency laboratory study carried out using credible methods: viral cultures.
Except that the final paragraph of the discussion hints that something is not quite right:
The public may be interested in the finding that virus may persist in an infectious state, on foods and food packaging surfaces, for several days under certain common conditions. There is the possibility of transmission through contaminated food if the food is in direct contact with the mouth and mucus membranes. The potential implications for public health are unclear since inhalation of respiratory aerosols and droplets is considered to be the main route of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
Readers of our transmission riddles will know by now that such statements are hostages to fortune; the “main route” would need a lot more evidence than presently available to make it “main”, whereas fomites so far tick more boxes.
Does the BBC piece put the study into the context of transmission: no. Does it refer to the available evidence for this and other respiratory viruses suggesting a more complicated transmission scenario: absolutely not. Do you go away with a feeling that if you touch a vegetable in a supermarket, you will end up in bed coughing?
About 15 years ago, Mike Broderick and colleagues followed the incidence of febrile acute respiratory infections (ARIs) caused by adenovirus in military units. They divided the units into “open” and “closed” according to whether they allowed potentially infectious convalescent soldiers to join or not. This was a proper study with viral cultures accompanied by PCR testing. The authors also went a bit further by sampling surface structures looking for viable adenovirus even in barracks which had been disused for some time. There was no difference in incidence between closed and open units. A result that mirrors our findings of hospital-acquired infection following viral circulation in the community (within a few days’ lag time), implying that measures such as distancing and barriers did not make any difference.
There’s more. Up to eight per cent of samples from surfaces in barracks which had not been used for a week turned up viable adenovirus, and the authors conclude that the source of the agent is environmental. Precisely what was found in several studies in daycare centres for young children in Denmark, where all types of respiratory and enteric viruses and bacteria populated soft toys, tables, and sofas.
To add to the body of pre-existing evidence, our review of SARS-CoV-2 found 23 studies that investigated fomite transmission and performed viral culture. Five studies demonstrated that replication-competent SARS-CoV-2 is present on fomites. Four of these were done in hospitals, and in the further study, two Chinese dock workers were found to have asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection during routine screening; the two workers were infected after contact with contaminated outer packaging from a fish cluster pallet.
A noteworthy aspect of establishing transmission is determining the minimum dose of virus particles that can initiate infection – the “minimal infectious dose” Data from a recent human challenge trial showed an intranasal exposure to one million genome copies might be required to yield approximately 50% chance of infection. A positive SARS-CoV-2 culture from fomites is at least three times more likely when the cycle threshold value is less than 30 (i.e., the sample has a higher viral load), and a plausible chain of transmission is strengthened by the presence of studies demonstrating genomic sequencing.
Science is cumulative. The BBC reporting would be enhanced if it set the findings of new studies in the context of what is known. It doesn’t take much to systematically search for what is already known. If reporters did so, the public might better understand the evidence – as opposed to the opinions – for how viruses are transmitted.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
Stop Press: MailOnline’s take on this story is: “Broccoli and raspberries could give you COVID, health experts warn after learning that virus can live on popular foods for as long as a week.”
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So it looks like the “science” came full circle then, lol.
The fomite route may simply be a result of fecal transmission, given how many people take their phones into the bathroom with them and rarely disinfect them.
Reminds me of that outbreak in a Florida bar in 2020, where interestingly the ONLY people in the crowded bar who caught the virus were this ONE group of friends sitting at the same table, who all caught it from one of them. And undoubtedly, passing around their phones that they brought into the bathroom, and sharing food and drink, and probably not even washing their hands in between. Fomite and/or fecal transmission may not be the dominant means of transmission, but it’s probably not zero either. All the more reason to wash your hands, don’t touch your face (masks actually make that more likely), don’t use your phone on the toilet, and disinfect your phone regularly.
Ew gross.
Mind you, this does remind me of how grubby kids can be and how easily they can pass things to eachother. You got me thinking of how, apart from 1 or 2 exceptions, every friend of my daughter who comes round to play doesn’t wash their hands after using the toilet. It’s literally a Dutch thing because I’ve experienced it countless times in lady’s loos out and about. I have to tell her friends to wash their hands all the time, like the hand hygiene police. But this should be automatic at 10yrs, 11yrs old right? Weird. Then they go sharing a tablet with unwashed hands…
Perhaps my standards are too high but this is basic stuff you learn when toilet training toddlers right?
And if you see a bloke coming out of the toilets and he’s doing up his fly you can be pretty confident he hasn’t washed his hands.
So true, Mogwai. It disgusts me to no end thinking about how pathetically low most people’s standards of basic hygiene are.
Apparently a lot of people take these mobile phone computer thingys into toilets – but never get round to cleaning them.
It always seems to me a bit of a losing battle in public toilets where you wash your hands but then have to grab a probably filthy handle to get out.
And then there’s train seats…
Yes I always think that as well so I just tend to open it with my non-dominant hand. Can’t exactly avoid all bugs on the many surfaces ( how often are the buttons you press at a pedestrian crossing cleaned? Then there’s handling our cash.. ) so I do carry a bottle of hand gel in my bag and try not to touch my face when out and about. But the fact we aren’t all permanently coming down with some bug or virus is testament to the fact that we have incredible and hugely complex immune systems looking after us every second of our lives. People should stop and appreciate their health and what our bodies are capable of ( mostly in an involuntary capacity beyond our conscious control ) more often actually, but the truth is most of us only consider this once something goes wrong. “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
Long before the arrival of mobile devices you could take into the bog there was a classic piece of graffiti in public conveniences: “There’s no use standing on the seat, the crabs in here jump six feet”
How about the fecal fountain? – not to mention hand dryers.
Can You Catch Covid From Groceries?
More bullshit from the world’s leading purveyor of Bullshit. The BBC. Can this outfit go any lower?
Quite agree. As far as I’m concerned this isn’t even relevant now. We’ve moved on way beyond modes of transmission now and if you’re still here I guess that’s because your immune system has been doing something right to get you through this “deadly” scamdemic.
File this under “Fear Porn”. Fear porn that’s almost 3 years out of date. Anyone remotely awake knows we’ve got more serious things to worry about than catching some lurgy from a tin of beans.
Indeed
BBC believes Rona flies for miles, mutates into eagles, or blue tits, who then converge into wolves, who then eat you. $cience. Conclusion: LDs worked.
The writers are scientists working in this field and rightly are concerned with accuracy. The way covid and other viruses are transmitted is I suppose a worthwhile field of study in so far as increasing knowledge is rarely a bad thing – and I suppose infection control in hospitals is quite important.
However, the fact is that viruses have existed since time immemorial and have so far been impossible to eradicate (and who’s to say eradicating them is a sensible goal), so the minutiae of their transmission is arguably not a subject of great societal importance or public interest. We simply cannot live in a manner that eliminates viral transmission, and attempts to do so will fail and cause more harm than good. I suppose one could slow it a bit, but I don’t know why anyone considers that a worthwhile goal.
So I don’t really care how covid is transmitted, because it’s simply not important enough to warrant turning how we live our lives upside down – be that lockdowns or disinfecting everything all the time.
Would eradicating viruses, even if it were possible, by any chance end up like eradicating sparrows did for the CCP?
I suspect that interest in “covid” from groceries and such like is in fact a symptom of psychological issues in a now fairly large percentage of the population?
Yes indeed, sparrows. Meddling in things we hardly understand with huge downside.
I am sure there are a few Covid loonies out there who are still obsessed with it but even the covidians I know who believe lockdowns were the right thing to do and that the vaxx saved them have moved on.
Indeed. Mother Nature does NOT like to be effed with! Nature is the ultimate Chesterton’s Fence if there ever was one.
Thanks. I’ve only just started reading Chesterton and I didn’t know about his fence.
You’re welcome. G.K. Chesterton was very wise man indeed. Of course, there was also the apocryphal “banana, stairs, and monkey” experiment that is effectively a foil to his fence analogy.
Interesting – what an educational place DS is. I’d not read about that experiment. I’ve read up on it now and it seems full of holes and not in any way a convincing foil to the fence analogy. He’s not saying you can’t change anything, just that you should understand the reasons for things before you change them.
It’s amazing the difference I’m witnessing, out and about in shops. The contrast between now and this time last year when the dreaded signs were on every shop door saying masks were necessary so all the muppets obediently did as they were told. Now I never see them. Maybe I’ll see 1 or 2 per week if I go into the city, always Chinese-looking people still. But is this because people are more clued up and red-pilled now or is it because they’re just awaiting their instructions and they’ll jump into automaton mode and dance to the government’s tune? I hope it’s the former but suspect, for most, it’s the latter.
Round my way it’s the frightened old. Down in London it’s a mixture of tourists, Chinese people and metropolitan virtue signallers.
Neither red pilled nor ready to mask up again- just not scared of Covid any more because they have all had it.
Still a few of the vile mask signs about, you know. A filthy habit…
“…who’s to say eradicating them is a sensible goal…”
Indeed. A well-established field of research is coming to the conclusion that we have viruses to thank for having nothing less than our memory!
Now where did I put that spanner
I’m more interested in whether it is really possible to catch “vaccines” from veggies (please tell me no), or spike protein shed from other shoppers.
Will anyone be able to avoid unwanted medication in the future (or present)?
‘… inhalation of respiratory aerosols and droplets…’
Well… time was when it was ONLY transmitted by gravity obeying water droplets hence masks and 1 metre apart to thwart ballistic motion, rather than Brownian motion of aerosols.
Contact infection via body fluids is possible, but a viable infection is dependent on viral load.
Can you catch CoVid from groceries? Only if you stuff them up your nose.
Stop press for the geniuses at the British Bullshit Corporation: we catch all sorts of things from life itself. Even life, as they say, is a sexually transmitted disease.
And a terminal one as well.
Hey who says that?
I haven’t heard that one.
Was it The Stones?
“we catch all sorts of things from life itself”
Exactly. It’s the proper balance between things that is being disturbed by an obsession with safety, of which covidianism was an extreme form. In the case of covid, the safety was always going to be illusory anyway. There’s a new virus, there’s nothing much we can do about it, some people will die, carry on regardless. Even now, saying that out loud will get you compared to Hitler, but to me it’s the only sane response.
Be afraid of your salad, be very afraid. Also, be afraid of everything else we tell you to be afraid of because just about anything could kill you. Your sweet new kitten? Forget her, she’s weaponised. So are the dogs and the hamster. What I have heard however that is far more concerning if it’s true is that scientists – doncha just love those curly haired, bespectacled boffins? – are looking at ways to put mRNA vaccines into food. Yes, food! I know this was commented on yesterday but it’s still on my ‘what is this new horror’ top ten list.
Fluoride in water too (and maybe other horrors).
That too, Hugh.
BAREFACED BULLS*IT CORPORATION
OMG – I’m so glad this was brought to my attention. I must stop snorting broccoli and raspberries and licking food packaging. In fact – I’m going to stop buying food all together and start feeding intravenously. Liquidised bugs, obvs.