SARS-CoV-2 viability on sports equipment is limited, and dependent on material composition
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Abstract
The control of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK has necessitated restrictions on amateur and professional sports due to the perceived infection risk to competitors, via direct person to person transmission, or possibly via the surfaces of sports equipment. The sharing of sports equipment such as tennis balls was therefore banned by some sport’s governing bodies. We sought to investigate the potential of sporting equipment as transmission vectors of SARS-CoV-2. Ten different types of sporting equipment, including balls from common sports, were inoculated with 40 μl droplets containing clinically relevant concentrations of live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Materials were then swabbed at time points relevant to sports (1, 5, 15, 30, 90 min). The amount of live SARS-CoV-2 recovered at each time point was enumerated using viral plaque assays, and viral decay and half-life was estimated through fitting linear models to log transformed data from each material. At one minute, SARS-CoV-2 virus was recovered in only seven of the ten types of equipment with the low dose inoculum, one at five minutes and none at 15 min. Retrievable virus dropped significantly for all materials tested using the high dose inoculum with mean recovery of virus falling to 0.74% at 1 min, 0.39% at 15 min and 0.003% at 90 min. Viral recovery, predicted decay, and half-life varied between materials with porous surfaces limiting virus transmission. This study shows that there is an exponential reduction in SARS-CoV-2 recoverable from a range of sports equipment after a short time period, and virus is less transferrable from materials such as a tennis ball, red cricket ball and cricket glove. Given this rapid loss of viral load and the fact that transmission requires a significant inoculum to be transferred from equipment to the mucous membranes of another individual it seems unlikely that sports equipment is a major cause for transmission of SARS-CoV-2. These findings have important policy implications in the context of the pandemic and may promote other infection control measures in sports to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and urge sports equipment manufacturers to identify surfaces that may or may not be likely to retain transferable virus.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.04.21251127: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Cell Line Authentication not detected. Table 2: Resources
Experimental Models: Cell Lines Sentences Resources Viral plaque assays: Viral plaque assays were carried out using VERO E6 cells in 24 well microtitre plates. VERO E6suggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: All experiments were …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.04.21251127: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Cell Line Authentication not detected. Table 2: Resources
Experimental Models: Cell Lines Sentences Resources Viral plaque assays: Viral plaque assays were carried out using VERO E6 cells in 24 well microtitre plates. VERO E6suggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: All experiments were carried under a single temperature and humidity, two parameters known to affect SARS-CoV-2 viability.26 Sports are played under different conditions due to seasonality and whether they take place in or outdoors. A more accurate assessment would include these variables. The minimum infectious dose of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown,7 and this makes it difficult to extrapolate the amount of virus on a surface necessary for transmission. The prospect of future human challenge models may provide this data.27 Our methodology employed a dry swab to retrieve the virus from the surfaces, in order to best replicate the transfer onto a player’s body or clothing. Higher viral recovery, and possibly less variation between replicates, would have been achieved by directly adding media to absorb virus23 or by using a wet swab.24 However, this would not replicate the real-world conditions that the experiments were designed to assess. The recovery rate of dry swabs varies, but has been estimated as 32-38% for recovering MS2 phage from steel surfaces, depending on the elution media.25 Therefore, more virus is likely to be present on the materials than our results may infer. This was a laboratory study, and further in-game behavioural studies are required to show frequency of potential transmission events to quantify risk. In practice many items of sports equipment are not routinely handed from person to person but instead rub against or collide with implements, oth...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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