The risk of contracting the coronavirus from touching a surface is low, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.
According to the CDC, there is a less than 1-in-10,000 chance of contracting COVID-19 from surfaces.
“People can be affected with the virus that causes COVID-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing in a New York Times report. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.”
The CDC said that it is possible for people to be infected with the coronavirus through surface contact, but the risk is generally considered low as “surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads.”
“The principal mode by which people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus," it said.
In most situations, cleaning surfaces with soap and detergent is enough to reduce the risk of transmission, according to the CDC's new guideline.
Disinfection is necessary only if there has been a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19 in an indoor space within the last 24 hours, it added.
“Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99 percent reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within three days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass.”
The CDC said there is also a low risk of contracting the disease from entering a space where an infected person has been.
The risk of fomite transmission can be reduced by wearing masks consistently and correctly, practicing hand hygiene, cleaning, and taking other measures to maintain healthy facilities, it added.
Joseph Allen, a building safety expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, suggested that schools, businesses, and other institutions that want to keep people safe should instead shift their attention from surfaces to air quality and invest in improved ventilation and filtration.
“This should be the end of deep cleaning,” Dr. Allen told the Times. “It has led to closed playgrounds, it has led to taking nets off basketball courts, it has led to quarantining books in the library. It has led to entire missed school days for deep cleaning. It has led to not being able to share a pencil. So that’s all that hygiene theater, and it’s a direct result of not properly classifying surface transmission as low risk.”