40 million people confined, closure of popular tourist places including the famous Great Wall ... China intensified its efforts on Friday to halt the spread of the new killer coronavirus. If at this stage the World Health Organization (WHO) has renounced declaring an international public health emergency, cases of contamination have been announced in Asia, but also in the United States.
Therefore, and very prosaically, some ask the question: should we give up, as a precaution, to have products or packages delivered from China, via AliExpress for example? "To my knowledge, the transmission of a virus through the contents of a package is unheard of," replied Eric D'Ortenzio, epidemiologist at Inserm and coordinator of the Reacting consortium, who immediately researches emerging diseases. "Relays are mainly people and animals," says Christian Perronne, the head of the infectious diseases department at the Raymond-Poincaré hospital in Garches.
To be able to answer this question firmly and definitively, it would still be necessary to know the survival time of this new pathogenic agent in the environment. "This is the question that all scientists are asking: clearly, we do not know at this stage," warns Eric D'Ortenzio.
"Several hours on a dry surface"
The only certainty, according to the researcher, the coronaviruses are "rather fragile", much less tenacious than the viruses of gastroenteritis, for example. "What we know from previous coronaviruses is that they can survive for several hours on dry surfaces", such as tables or doorknobs.
"But again, their lifespan depends on other parameters, such as temperature and humidity," he insists. In other words, if it is advisable to remain cautious, it remains however very unlikely that the 2019-NCoV coronavirus survives transport by plane, a fortiori in the hold, where the temperatures are extreme.
The toll of this coronavirus, which appeared in December on a market in Wuhan (central China), has worsened further, with 26 deaths out of a total of 830 infected people, 177 of whom were considered serious, according to the latest official report.
