And I read somewhere else (but can't find it now) that aerosol viruses can remain viable as long as 16 hours in enclosed spaces.
A few days ago, I read a paper that stated that droplets evaporated by 95% in less than a second (I want to say 1/24 of a second) in a room at 50% humidity.
Clearly, ambient temperature and humidity are going to affect evaporation and virus survival rates.
Another paper said that viruses do not survive very long on the hands, I think it was only a few seconds.
I have read many papers, but unfortunately forget to bookmark them. I will look for the paper that discusses the evaporation rates and post a link if I find it.
Yesterday, I found three papers in which the efficacy of face masks in the context of Covid-19 was evaluated. Yep, the data actually shows that face masks, as well as social distancing and eye protection, work to reduce spread of Covid-19. The blog excerpted at the top of this thread was written by a physicist who has zero experience in infectious diseases. Two of the studies of mask efficacy were written by people in the field (MDs, PhDs, MPHs, MSs); the other was written by economists and statisticians but their references appear to be valid. I did bookmark these papers.
Dynamics of infectious disease transmission by inhalable respiratory droplets
And the relevant passage: "Evaporation, being a molecular process, is very fast (Nicas et al. 2005; Morawska 2006); for example, a 20 µm droplet evaporates to a 1 µm diameter droplet within 0.24 s−1 (at 50% ambient relative humidity). Henceforth, we neglect droplet evaporation, and we follow Nicas et al. (2005) to take the post-evaporation diameter (approximately) half the pre-evaporation diameter."