Underlying all this, the CDC believed that the coronavirus was behaving like influenza, and so the most plausible explanation for these mysterious chains of transmission must be some contaminated surface that patients had touched, where they picked up the virus through respiratory droplets left behind on a subway pole or a door handle. In reality, a lot of those puzzling chains of transmission weren’t the result of fomites, but rather, asymptomatic carriers who had gone on to unknowingly infect those around them. Since the CDC believed that SARS-CoV-2 spread like flu, however, they discounted
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