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Touching Fruits & Vegetables At Market Might’ve Contributed To COVID-19 Spread According to Experts

2021-09-08 , 8:56 am

It’s been around for over a year and a half, but we’re still learning new things about the coronavirus.

While we were aware that touchpoints in shared spaces could facilitate transmission, we assumed that this was limited to things like buttons and doorknobs.

But COVID-19 never fails to surprise us, and now it appears that some of the foods that we buy on a regular basis could spread the disease as well.

A Brief Recap

Remember the Bukit Merah View Market cluster?

Before KTV lounges and bus interchanges, this market and food centre cluster was the government’s main concern, due to the number of residents who patronised the eatery.

When it was still active, it was one of our largest COVID-19 clusters at the time, with 94 cases.

This is why the authorities conducted several rounds of testing in neighbouring blocks, swabbing over 200,000 residents in total.

As a result, the authorities closed all 182 market stalls for two weeks.

According to Experts, Touching Fruits & Vegetables At Market Might’ve Caused COVID-19 Spread

Months later, a study has revealed that touching fruits and vegetables may have contributed to the spread of the virus in the cluster.

The study, conducted by the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), showed that most of the cases in the cluster had three things in common:

They were unvaccinated
They did not wear their masks properly
They often touched fruits and vegetables with their bare hands

Of course, we cannot say for sure if the virus spread through the fruits and vegetables, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Sanitise, Sanitise, Sanitise

One way to get around this is to sanitise your hands regularly.

If you happen to carry your hand sanitiser with you when you go out, you could sanitise your hands before and after handling the fruit and vegetables.

Of course, there’s no point in religiously sanitising your hands if your nose is popping out of your face mask.

So, in addition to maintaining good hygiene, we should also ensure that we wear our face masks properly, and wash them regularly if they’re reusable.

Vaccination can also help to prevent transmission and lowers one’s risk of falling severely ill from COVID-19.

A Difficult Distinction

There is a difficulty in distinguishing fomite (surface) transmission to spread from respiratory droplets, though.

As the World Health Organisation explained: “People who come into contact with potentially infectious surfaces often also have close contact with the infectious person, making the distinction between a respiratory droplet and fomite transmission difficult to discern.”

It added, however, that fomite transmission has been found to be a viable mode of transmission, based on the evidence we have.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a slightly different take, saying that fomite transmission is not the main route by which COVID-19 spreads and that the risk is considered low.

In any case, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?