And it would have been super easy for someone to do this research too. Get a hundred monkeys and place active Covid on their meals. See if they contract it.* As far as I know, nobody did this. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. I’d legitimately love to see the study and wouldn’t be surprised with either result. I’m just disappointed that there was all this opportunity for basic research that wasn’t done (although I have scientist friends who assure me that data is coming someday, although they don’t specifically know who is analyzing it they feel confident someone somewhere is)
There's two very good reasons nobody did this - because it would have been fucking expensive, and it wouldn't have proven anything. Proving a negative is hard, e.g. COVID is NOT spread by contact transmission, cats are NOT the primary cause of the decline in songbird population, polymer networks with extensive long-range intermolecular interactions are NOT described by a de Gennes reptation or Rouse model. You get the picture. The reason it's hard is that there's usually a few counterexamples. Is COVID spread by contact? We could probably find a few cases where it possibly happened, sure.
It's much easier to accumulate positive examples until your colleagues scoff at a paper with a negative example. Sure, here's a case of possible foodborne COVID transmission. But there's
two hundred thousand cases over here that were most likely respiratory transmission. Your single case is probably an anomaly or a lazy contact tracer. Is the single negative example sometimes a thread that unravels the established theories of an entire subfield? Sure, it happens sometimes. But not all the time.
So is COVID spread via physical contact? Unlikely. We don't say no, because scientists are cautious about making provably false statements. But it's much more likely it spreads via respiratory droplets,
"But maybe if we'd done the monkey experiment we would have had evidence! We just don't know!"
I don't really do in vivo studies so this is just speculation, but let's think this through. We acquire (say) 1,000 rhesus monkeys at a prohibitive cost of 5 million dollars, and hire a bunch of cheap postdocs and grad students to run the study. Let's say the facilities and staff are free, though they most certainly would not be. You feed them COVID laced mangoes.
Two possible outcomes:
1. They don't get COVID. Maybe we didn't give them enough. Maybe we waited too long between dosing and ingestion and the virus died. Maybe eating mangoes and COVID simultaneously reduces the potency of the virus. Maybe monkeys are less susceptible to oral COVID infection than humans are.
2. They get COVID. Maybe monkeys are more susceptible to COVID infection via the oral route than humans are. Maybe COVID manages to reproduce on room temperature mangoes but not room temperature bread. Maybe we gave them more COVID than a human would eat, even if the symptomatic line cook full on sneezed onto their food.
Meanwhile, while you're frantically trying to get your funding agency to give you more money for the followup experiments, the theory that "COVID is spread largely by people breathing in droplets breathed out infected people" explains most of the cases, and getting people to wear masks so they stop breathing air from all over the room and just the little pocket in front of them seems to reduce infection rates.
tl;dr Microwave your food if it makes you feel better. Just wear your mask.