Study shows that Covid-19 can survive high temperatures
Dr Thiravat Hema-chudha, a senior medical lecturer at Chulalongkorn University, on Sunday (April 19) said heat of 60 degrees Celsius or higher cannot kill Covid-19 or its ability to replicate, when the virus is in a dirty environment.
Some scientists had theorised that higher-temperature climates in Asia were one reason why infection rates were many times lower there than in European countries, but the new findings appear to pour cold water on that idea.
Dr Thiravat shared the findings of researchers at Aix-Marseille University in France, which were published by the South China Morning Post newspaper on Sunday.
The newspaper said that scientists infected African green monkey kidney cells with a strain of Covid-19 from a patient in Berlin.
The cells were loaded into “clean” and “dirty” test tubes along with animal proteins to simulate biological contamination in real-life samples, such as an oral swab.
After heating for an hour, the strains in the clean tube were completely deactivated, while those in the dirty environment survived.
The heating process resulted in a clear drop in infectivity, but enough living strains remained to be able to start new round for infection, said the newspaper.