The Saxton Group

How Covid-19 Spreads

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19
mainly spreads from person to person.

When someone who is infected coughs or sneezes, they send droplets containing the virus into the air. A healthy person can then breathe in those droplets. You can also catch the virus if you touch a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touch your mouth, nose, or eyes.

Coronavirus: What you Need to Know

The coronavirus can live for hours to days on surfaces like countertops and doorknobs. How long it survives depends on the material the surface is made from.

Here's a guide to how long coronaviruses -- the family of viruses that includes the one that causes COVID-19 -- can live on some of the surfaces you probably touch on a daily basis. Keep in mind that researchers still have a lot to learn about the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19. For example, they don't know whether exposure to heat, cold, or sunlight affects how long it lives on surfaces.

Metal
Examples: doorknobs, jewelry, silverware
5 days

Wood
Examples: furniture, decking
4 days

Plastics
Examples: packaging like milk containers and detergent bottles, subway and bus seats, backpacks, elevator buttons
2 to 3 days

Stainless steel
Examples: refrigerators, pots and pans, sinks, some water bottles
2 to 3 days

Copper
Examples: pennies, teakettles, cookware
4 hours

Aluminum
Examples: soda cans, tinfoil, water bottles
2 to 8 hours

Glass
Examples: drinking glasses, measuring cups, mirrors, windows
Up to 5 days

Ceramics
Examples: dishes, pottery, mugs
5 days

Paper (Mostly unknown)
The length of time varies.
Other strains of coronavirus live for only a few minutes on paper, while others live for up to 5 days.

Food
Coronavirus doesn't seem to spread through exposure to food. Still, it's a good idea to wash fruits and vegetables under running water before you eat them. Scrub them with a brush or your hands to remove any germs that might be on their surface. Wash your hands after you visit the supermarket. If you have a weakened immune system, you might want to buy frozen or canned produce.

Water
Coronavirus hasn't been found in drinking water. If it does get into the water supply, your local water treatment plant filters and disinfects the water, which should kill any germs.
Coronaviruses can live on a variety of other surfaces, like fabrics and countertops.

Coronavirus Transmission: What You Need to Know

What You Can Do
To reduce your chance of catching or spreading coronavirus, clean and disinfect all surfaces and objects in your home and office every day. This includes:

* Countertops
* Tables
* Doorknobs
* Bathroom fixtures
* Phones
* Keyboards
* Remote controls
* Toilets

Use a household cleaning spray or wipe. If the surfaces are dirty, clean them first with soap and water and then disinfect them.
Keep surfaces clean, even if everyone in your house is healthy. People who are infected may not show symptoms, but they can still shed the virus onto surfaces.

After you visit the drugstore or supermarket, or bring in takeout food or packages, wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and warm water. Do the same thing after you pick up a delivered newspaper.

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We are recommending this book

The Top 10 Ways That Clear Writing Can Boost Your Career
By Josh Bernoff, author of Writing Without Bu****it.

You may not think you're a business writer, but you are. You write emails. Perhaps you write web pages or reports or news releases. And whatever you write, you're probably doing it wrong. What you learned in school is the exact opposite of what you need to succeed in a world where everyone reads on a screen.

People today spend about 36 seconds on the average news article. A typical businessperson spends 46 hours per week reading and writing. They're busy, and their lives are cluttered. You need to write in a way that punches through the noise. You need to write without bu****it.

Here are my top ten tips for writing that succeeds at work:

1. Move beyond fear. When you're afraid, you write like you're afraid. Stop hedging and say what you mean. You'll get credit for directness.

2. Write shorter. Delete the warmup sentences. Organize carefully. Delete repetitive content. If you keep your emails under 250 words, people will be more likely to read them.

3. Front-load your writing. Make your titles and subject lines descriptive. Tell the story in the first two sentences. You haven't got long to capture people's attention.

4. Purge passive voice. Passive sentences frustrate people. Don't tell us "the new system is estimated to cost $150,000." Tell us who's responsible: "The IT department estimates that the new system will cost $150,000."

5. Replace jargon. Big words are more likely to confuse readers than impress them. Don’t tell us that you've "become part of the vendor ecosystem” when you really mean "our product is now compatible with other companies' software."

6. Eliminate weasel words. Weasel words are vague, meaningless intensifiers. When you tell us you're "incredibly excited about the new hire's massive performance improvement and deep knowledge of the subject," we sense that you’re bu****itting us. Replace the intensifiers and qualifiers with facts and statistics.

7. Reveal structure. Paragraphs suck for online readers, especially when stacked on one another like cinder blocks. Use headings, bullets, lists, tables, graphics, and links to make writing easier to scan and parse.

8. Structure your process. If you're writing something long, spend the first half of your time on research and planning. Then, when it's time to write, you'll have everything at your fingertips.

9. Write a fat outline. Regular outlines are worthless for planning. Pretend you're writing a "treatment" for Hollywood: Include details, quotes, and ideas in your outline. Fat outlines force you to plan more thoroughly, and they're great for communicating your plan to others.

10. Manage reviews with discipline. Reviewers will ruin your best writing if you let them. Give each reviewer a specific task, like verifying technical details or the correctness of language. Set deadlines so the reviews come back together. Then, don't just do what they say; use your creativity to solve the problems they've found without losing the soul of what you wrote.

Whether you're writing web copy or research reports, make an impact. Don't write to fit in. Write to stand out. Write without bu****it.