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"Hygiene Theater" doesn't reduce the risk of COVID-19
My family stopped wiping down all our groceries to "disinfect" them a couple months ago, mostly because of hygiene exhaustion. Then in May, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention clarified its own Web page about how COVID-19 spreads to state that "based on data from lab studies on COVID-19 and what we know about similar respiratory diseases, it may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this isnt thought to be the main way the virus spreads."
Still, many of us are still embracing "hygiene theater," activities that might make us feel better but, according to microbiologist Emanuel Goldman's article in medical journal The Lancet, those tactics don't have much to do with how COVID-19 is actually transmitted. (Wear a fucking mask.) Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic:
Read the restAll those studies that made COVID-19 seem likely to live for days on metal and paper bags were based on unrealistically strong concentrations of the virus. As he explained to me, as many as 100 people would need to sneeze on the same area of a table to mimic some of their experimental conditions. The studies stacked the deck to get a result that bears no resemblance to the real world," Goldman said[...]
A good case study of how the coronavirus spreads, and does not spread, is the famous March outbreak in a mixed-use skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea.
Original Link: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/30/hygiene-theater-doesnt-r.html