When “Karen” tells me “I follow science”, I’ve taken to silently appending, often (but by no means always) in my mind, “you absorbed a CDC announcement a little over a year ago”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The people maniacally scrubbing surfaces? As re Covid, it’s largely a wasted effort<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Via the Atlantic, which nearly along among periodicals has done a good job of actual journalism as re public health:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever I\u2019ve written about hygiene theater, some people have responded with the same objection: \u201cHey, what\u2019s the matter with washing our hands?\u201d That\u2019s an easy one: Absolutely nothing. \u201cPandemic or no pandemic, you should wash your hands, especially after you prepare food, go to the bathroom,\u201d or touch something yucky, Goldman said.<\/p> But hygiene theater carries with it an immense opportunity cost. Too many institutions spend scarce funds or sacrifice scarce resources to do microbial battle against fomites that don\u2019t pose a real threat. This is especially true of cash-strapped urban-transit authorities and school districts that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> on soap technology rather than their central task of transporting and teaching people.<\/em><\/p> Hygiene theater also muddles the public-health message. If you tell people, \u201cThis disease is on surfaces, on your clothes, on your hands, on your face, and also in the air,\u201d they will react in a scattered and scared way. But if you tell people the truth\u2014this virus doesn\u2019t do very well on surfaces, so you should focus on ventilation\u2014they can protect themselves against what matters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n