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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

It’s still awaiting peer review, but initial research suggest 24 hours of stability on cardboard, 2-3 days on plastic and metals:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-does-the-coronavirus-la...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

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Out of an abundance of caution I've just been leaving packages in my garage for a week before opening them.

If you have the space and can order stuff a week before you need it, I suggest this.

A great suggestion, I do this also. It helps to cleanup packaging in one fell swoop as well.

Sunlight (UV exposure) helps kill bugs. If you're not worried about porch pirates, I'd leave the packages in the sun. Perhaps turn them over now and then.

Same. Definitely an abundance of caution but if you have the space it can’t hurt.

Almost the same here, leaving them in garage for two days. It feels weird how the new normal, protocols to avoid infection, are starting to seem like the same old routine now. Wonder how it will feel after a few months, or more.

I'm curious to see if packages and deliveries were seen as transmission vectors in any other infectious epidemics. If packages were a reliable transmission vector, you'd expect to see much higher infection rate of truckers, postal workers, shop clerks, etc. I haven't found evidence of this.

I know that China relied heavily on deliveries for food and essential goods in Wuhan, but also seemed to be having people doing deliveries kitted in protective gear.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/08/8129257...

Not sure how this affected transmission, but doubt the same protections will be in place for delivery workers in the US because of shortages masks, gloves, etc.

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