Aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 (SARS-CoV-2) compared to SARS-CoV-1

Neeltje van Doremalen; Trenton Bushmaker; Dylan Morris; Myndi Holbrook; Amandine Gamble; Brandi Williamson; Azaibi Tamin; Jennifer Harcourt; Natalie Thornburg; Susan Gerber; Jamie Lloyd-Smith; Emmie de Wit; Vincent Munster

To the Editor, 21 A novel human coronavirus, now named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 22 (SARS-CoV-2, referred to as HCoV-19 here) that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019 is now causing a 23 pandemic 1 . Here, we analyze the aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 and compare it with SARS-24 CoV-1, the most closely related human coronavirus. 2 We evaluated the stability of HCoV-19 and SARS- HCoV-19 remained viable in aerosols throughout the duration of our experiment (3 hours) with a 30 reduction in infectious titer from 10 3.5 to 10 2.7 TCID 50 /L, similar to the reduction observed for SARS-CoV-31 1, from 10 4.3 to 10 3.5 TCID 50 /mL ( Figure 1A ).