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| Thüringer Bratwurst at Wursthall, San Mateo. |
If you've been making yourself crazy with fear over your failure to accomplish the impossible—washing every piece of clothing after each wearing, or disinfecting the shopping bag and wiping down the boxes and bottles before you put them in their cupboards, or washing lettuce with soap, or treating the whole house as if it was a restaurant kitchen, I've got some hope to hold out that it doesn't have to be quite as hard as it seems, from the esteemed chef and writer J. Kenji López-Alt, who's been writing recently on Covid hygiene and showed up for a radio interview with Francis Lam this morning of which the text and audio are here: Food in particular is pretty strongly unlikely to be in and of itself a problem.
FL: But, there is a theoretical risk anyway of touching stuff that a sick person might have sneezed on and then getting that into our system. Given that, it does sound like food could be a way of getting infected, right?
JKLA: Well, it is a novel virus like you said. We’re still doing research on it. There’s always a possibility, of course, but what we do know for certain is by far the majority of cases – in fact every case we’ve found so far or every case we’ve tracked so far – none have been linked to food or packaging or any kind of fomite is what it’s called, when it gets on something, gets on a solid object and is transferred to a person that way. All of the spread patterns we’ve seen have been based on aerosolized or droplet forms. Basically, when someone sneezes or coughs or breathes very moist air, viral load can get into that moisture, into the air, and you would breathe it into your respiratory system, into your lungs. That’s the main mechanism of transfer, which is similar to how previous coronaviruses like SARS and MERS were spread as well. Again, with those, neither one of them showed any signs of foodborne transmission.
