A Review of the Stability of Coronaviruses in Different Environments

The world has made unprecedented efforts to control the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), however, the number of positive cases are increasingly being seen every day. Therefore, there is an urgent need for more effective preventive measures to limit the spread of the infection which require more precise understanding of the routes of transmission and its stability in different environments.

In this review, all articles published up to September, 2020 on the stability of coronaviruses, including SARS‐CoV‐2 were studied. PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Sciencedirect and Google Scholar were thoroughly searched. Keywords used in the search were Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and Stability. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updates were also used for the latest information on the disease.

Transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2 was observed to be through aerosols. SARS-CoV-2 and other human and animal coronaviruses have very low stability on low porosity surfaces. The stability of SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces in vitro was similar to that of SARS-CoV-1. Some coronaviruses can survive for many hours to days in fecal, water, and wastewater samples. Findings showed the risk of transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2 through fecal-oral route and water contaminated by wastewater. Coronaviruses survive at lower temperatures and lower relative humidity.

There are still many challenges to the survival of coronaviruses and very little data is currently available. Lack of effective treatment and vaccines call for more protective measures and good personal hygiene to avoid infection and preventing its spread.