Everything I've read says 60%. Two tiny bottles of commercial sanitizer I have here contain 60%. That said, the ration is still wrong. Should be 2/3 91% alcohol and 1/3 Aloe. FWIW, when I mixed some with the 2:1 ratio it came out much less viscous than the commercial versions (which I think use glycerine).Originally Posted by Ed Richards
As someone who spent most of his professional life studying bacterial and viral diseases I would repeat jp's comment. Just let it sit for a day and you should be fine. Surface survival is usually less than a few hours for most viruses and corona has an estimated surface survival time of 9 hours.
A very good answer. It's also a good time to learn to do it yourself.
Appears to be more complicated than that for SARS-CoV-2 in particular:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973
That said, the findings in that NEJM letter are still consistent with this advice:
You're right. Typing error. That's the ratio I actually used. 2/3 alcohol (91% isopropyl), 1/3 aloe.
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But that's if the virus is on a flat surface. What if the virus got closed up in an envelope sealed from evaporation and exposure to air? What if the stock boy at the grocery store was packing your Coke bottles and trapped the virus along with his snot near the caps threads with the bottle just where you're going to handle it when you get it. The snot isn't going to evaporate so fast. It might be there the next day. I think you might be making too many assumptions. Tests are made under pristine conditions for consistancy. It'll be the oddball that will get you.
I'm waiting three days or if sooner, spraying the surface hopefully sufficiently with a disinfectant that will kill whatever's there. As an old fart, I may be more paranoid than most.
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Just keep washing your hands like you want to wash the skin off of them!
This is a respiratory virus. You have to get it into your respiratory system to get it. If someone sneezes on your film box, it gets in the mail, and you touch it a day later, you still have to then bring your hands to your face and get the virus-containing particles onto your face to actually get it. The viral load will be diluted in each of these transfer steps, and washing your hands with soap will destroy it.
There is no harm that I know of in letting packages, film boxes, etc to sit for three days to be sure, but I think the publicity surrounding the study that shows the virus can survive on surfaces for a while has got people too paranoid about touch, and not enough about breath. I was at the grocery store two days ago, and a shopper there had on nitrile gloves, but no facemask! That doesn't make much sense.
(It's also rather difficult to take off a pair of nitrile gloves without contaminating yourself with the stuff on the outside. Medical professionals have a technique for doing that, but I wouldn't expect Joe Average to execute it correctly without practice.)
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