Just read of a report from the National; Institute of Health which has checked via scientific methods and found that COVID-19 in a normal environment can remain viable (meaning you can catch it) in the air for 3 hours and on impermeable surfaces like stainless steel and plastics for 3 days. And they reiterated that people showing no symptoms can transmit the disease. It's generally believed that from infection to symptoms being detected takes from 2 to 14 days, with most cases being around 4-5 days. Someone who gets around a lot could be leaving a trail of infection 3 hours long behind them everywhere they go, and those who contact that will be doing the same in a few days. That goes a long way in explaining why "community" outbreaks grow so large so fast- they're already well underway before the first person shows any symptoms, gets tested positive, and leaves the public arena. We're closing the barn doors long after the cows have run away in how we're handling this right now
It points even stronger to my call for
testing everyone now instead of trying to save some tests for later. The good of 100 tests now will equal what it will take 1000+ tests to do later
![Cautious :cautious: :cautious:](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f612.png)
The type of test needed (RT-PCR) was known and recognized ahead of time; basically the same type of test which was used for SARS and MERS but 'tweaked' for this variation......