Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
We were quite right to err on the side of caution in the early days of covid. But things like spraying down checkout stations went on for long, long after we knew covid wasn’t spread by surface transmission*. It became a kind of hygiene theatre, with the participants going through the motions of pretending it was a necessary or effective measure.
* The July 2020 issue of the Lancet pretty conclusively debunked the notion that fomite spread played a significant role in covid transmission. Many stores, transit systems, etc. were still doing conspicuous wipe-downs and deep cleans more than 12 months later.
|
There was a portion of it that might have been theatre, I agree. But I honestly do believe the spray down stuff for instance was an indirect method of prevention. It's just the communication was so bad that people kept talking of things out of context. It was like the blind men and the elephant and one dude at the back yelling, "The odds of getting shat on is a pretty ####ing high!" and the dude at the trunk going, "No it ####ing isn't!"
At the time, one of the key words was "viral load". Covid isn't the only thing that has viruses or illness. So if you kept surfaces clean and your body wasn't distracted working on garden variety salmonella for instance, your body would have more resources to divert towards fighting off the illness once you got it. So many people seemed to act like all other viruses, bacteria etc. disappeared after Covid arrived. I remember a convo where I said we needed to worry about BOTH Covid AND RSV for kids during the surges in the fall and the person looked at me and said I was a Covid denier idiot because RSV wasn't worse than Covid.
So perhaps the decision making by those in charge were right in continuing surface cleaning, but wrong on occasion in directly correlating it would help to directly reduce the transmission of Covid. It would at best indirectly reduce the severity of Covid.
That's the only way I could reconcile some of the weird gaps in logic at the time. I just considered it part of the theatre piece we needed to play as participants in a good society.
I got pretty frustrated at those who were militant in sanitizing groceries, then one of the first to go on trip and claiming the quarantine protocols were bunk. We don't solely worry whether you have Covid upon return. I don't want to increase my odds of no nasty cold either.