We had to wash our hands, the prime minister said. We had to sing a song while we washed our hands and only stop when the song was over, the Minister of Health knew. At the start of the pandemic, we thought our lives depended on washing our hands and not touching shopping carts that weren’t disinfected.
We didn’t know any better then. But now it is. The virus, we now know, hardly spreads through the surface and especially through the air.
We understood the danger of internal spaces, the importance of ventilation and the difference between a fabric mask and an N95. In the meantime, we usually stopped talking about washing our hands. The times when people could be heard humming “long live” in public restrooms have quickly disappeared. And the packaging wipes and ostentatious workplace disinfection protocols have faded, although bottles of disinfectant are still present in many places.
If hand washing isn’t as important as we thought in March 2020, how important it is, ask The Atlantic.
Any public health expert will tell you that you still need to wash your hands. Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, considers “healthy hygiene” to protect us from a host of viruses spread through close contact and touch, such as gastrointestinal viruses.
However, the pandemic has provided evidence that coronavirus phomitic transmission – inanimate contaminated objects or surfaces – plays a much smaller role and airborne transmission a much larger role than we thought. And the same is probably true of other respiratory diseases, such as influence and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, said Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer and aerosol expert at Virginia Tech.
Goldman will unveil a groundbreaking study in December showing that the superficial spread of Covid is negligible and likely responsible for less than 0.01% of all infections. If true, it would mean that the chances of catching the flu or cold by touching something are next to nil.
The scientific discussion isn’t over yet, but if you forget to wash your hands when you leave a store, there’s probably not much of a danger.
