If something has to give, it seems to me like a strong possibility it's the R0 range estimate. Authorities, and to some extent media, in my country have been very tenacious in trying to reassure people. Often up to the point of outright disinformation. At the start of this week the pacifier statement in vogue was that the mortality rate estimate is inflated because the severe cases are those who self-present for care. and thus testing. so if one counts all the cases, including the undetected ones, a much smaller fraction are lethal.

Well, that one's true, but the flip side of that, which nobody here has wanted to address so far, is that to the extent the transmissibility is calculated based on corresponding data, that estimate is going to be deficient instead, because it's failing to include some of the contagion that resulted in cases that went undetected. Hopefully the people making the estimates know better than that because of other data sources, but the main one I can think of (maybe aside of South Korea's broad biochemical testing, which may be a relatively unbiased sample according to my perception?) is contact tracing of confirmed cases. And I think it's downright likely that at least our contact tracers would miss fomite transmission and persistent aerosol transmission until now, because the party line touted here, at least officially, is "you get the disease though close contact over a long time with someone who is sick" lately expanded to include "or if somebody coughs or sneezes at you" (emphasis mine).

The other thing I can think of to somewhat reconcile the observations is even if the virus has a high durability in the environment, the total transmission process would be contingent on other factors too, one of which is the dose needed to get an infection going.

I have a life science background, but not specific expertise in this area. Would appreciate if someone has good clarifications to share about how accurate the transmissibility estimates are likely to be and why.

You typically need more than just 1 virus in your system to get infected. Your immune system will do a good job of taking care of the 1.

The study just says they were able to detect live viruses after that amount of time, not that they would definitely infect you. It's likely that the odds of infection are very low before that 3 hour mark.

Unless I'm misreading the study.

Because while you can be an asymptomatic carrier it doesn’t you are very infectious at that point, viral shedding levels and coughing play a bit role in this.

Also if the R0 value is much higher than the current estimate it’s good because it would also means it has a much lower mortality rate and overall much less lower severe infection rate than what we currently can estimate.

R0 values are very hard to calculate for novel viruses you usually only can figure it out after multiple outbreaks where you can account and control for environmental and societal conditions.