I haven’t looked into this in any detail, but I also don’t remember seeing it mentioned anywhere else: is it known whether detecting viral RNA on surfaces is actually correlated with infectiousness? For example, my (limited) understanding of the infection process is that the virus is essentially RNA inside a protein capsule which protects it long enough to infect cells, and any naked foreign extracellular RNA would quickly get broken down by RNases. On surfaces, is it possible that some of the protein capsules have “broken down” such that their RNA is exposed, and therefore much less or even non-infectious?
I haven’t looked into this in any detail, but I also don’t remember seeing it mentioned anywhere else: is it known whether detecting viral RNA on surfaces is actually correlated with infectiousness? For example, my (limited) understanding of the infection process is that the virus is essentially RNA inside a protein capsule which protects it long enough to infect cells, and any naked foreign extracellular RNA would quickly get broken down by RNases. On surfaces, is it possible that some of the protein capsules have “broken down” such that their RNA is exposed, and therefore much less or even non-infectious?