12 ms·
Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection
- renewiltord 6y agoWe've known this for like a year, right? All the spraying and stuff is performative, like the brown M&Ms of COVID sécurité.
- thedevelopnik 6y agoHey, the brown M&M’s actually served an important purpose as a signal!
- bryanrasmussen 6y agolike, theoretically someone could have read the full Van Halen rider and thought, damn we're not doing all this stuff but lets do the brown M&M's thing because you know how these touchy, irrational artist types are, if they see one brown M&M they probably lose it!
- pengaru 6y agoI think you're missing the point...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 6y agothe point was that the brown m&ms have an important signalling effect? and I said well there could be a case in which the signal you thought you were receiving from the m&ms being present was wrong?
- pengaru 6y agoThe point is only to detect whether they read enough of the contract to find that buried, arbitrary but highly visible detail, not to ensure they execute everything within it.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoIn the versions of the story if they didn't execute that point Van Halen's roadie would go on the warpath and go through everything to determine stuff was done correctly, so I mean the point was not that they read the contract? No one cares if you read the contract, they care that you do what is in the contract - of course doing what is in the contract requires that you read it first, but it is the doing that people care about. If you have not done the M&Ms correctly you have not read the contract that means you could not have done the important things they require.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoThe point was to see if they had read the Van Halen rider. If there were no brown M&M's then they knew the venue had at least read the document.
- renewiltord 6y agoRight right. That's what I meant. By doing this as well, you're sort of saying "We're doing this pain in the ass thing that has no value. You can bet we're doing all the easy things that do have value as well".
- aksss 6y agoI loathe every time someone brings up the quirky neat trivia of brown M&M’s - it always results in ten comments trying to error-check the lore and one comment about how they loathe the whole exercise.
- peytn 6y agoDid anyone call this early on? Would’ve been nice to hear a free and open debate from the start—I don’t recall seeing one. There are costs to doing things everywhere on the planet “just in case.”
- kevml 6y agoDebate? I’d rather rely on scientific guidance and updates as more information becomes available. Within the first few weeks we received updates that it was highly unlikely to be transmitted through surface contact. That information became more and more detailed as time went on. There is little debate in the matter.
- refurb 6y agoWell considering every public places seems to be disinfecting every possible surface every 5 minutes, seems like the message wasn't received?
- adrianN 6y agoIt makes people feel safer and is relatively cheap, so public spaces are incentivized to do it.
- brundolf 6y agoI get the sense that's happening more for show: businesses want people to feel safe coming in; bragging about thorough cleaning procedures is a way of conveying that, whether it works or not
- rainyMammoth 6y agoyou nailed it. It is virtue signaling. A theater to display to everyone that you are on the right side of the debate and that you are taking covid seriously. I would even bet that most people issuing the cleaning guidance know that it is almost useless, but we live in a world in which it is more important for your actions to make you perceived the way you want rather than being effective.
- dominostars 6y agoI’m fairly certain information like this or similar was communicated very early on in the pandemic. A lot of people I know were sanitizing things from the grocery store for the first few weeks but then it quickly spread that surface transmission was very rare so everyone stopped.
- hanselot 6y agoTalk a world of bull**, every single place in my country has hand sanitizer and cleans every surface religiously. Watch them astroturf their megaplague to hide the fact that they were distracting the world from Maxwell and Epstein.
- mrkeen 6y agoHow do you link hand sanitizer to Maxwell and Epstein?
- michaelmrose 6y agoFair question but at some degree of bad faith flagging and moving on is more effective.
- CoastalCoder 6y agoProbably true. The challenge (for me, at least) is discerning bad faith from other, more correctable issues in a conversation.
- michaelmrose 6y agoAs I speak to someone with a recently created account the irony is palpable but people who are overt trolls or who make a habit of speaking in bad faith are liable to be banned eventually instead of accruing a longer history and karma. If the account has little karma or comment history and appears to be behaving badly its more likely to be a problem child.
- 6y ago
- brudgers 6y agothe relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is considered low compared with direct contact, droplet transmission, or airborne transmission 1, 2. However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoNon native english speaker, in this case is 'Airborne' transmission meant to mean the same as transmission through aerosol particles?
- barsonme 6y agoHere’s what they mean: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/scientific-brief-sars-cov-2.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... (Sorry for just pasting a link, but I think it’ll be more clear than any summary I could make.)
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoIndeed the link was a lot more useful in clarifying terms. It's a shame that the media themselves misuse the term aerosol in this context.
- ohgodplsno 6y agoWatch as HN takes its signature air of superiority and says "I called it last year it was so obvious smh". 1. Basic safety principles mean that as long as we're not sure, keep doing it 2. You may have been enjoying a year surprisingly free of common colds, of flus, and many more other illnesses. These are absolutely transmitted through surfaces, and increasing hygiene standards is the best way to get rid of them. Keep washing your hands you filthy animals.
- alcover 6y ago> as long as we're not sure, keep doing it There are diminishing returns in this caution principle, while the harm caused by the deluge of disinfection products on the environment and ourselves certainly adds-up. You can never be 100% sure you won't get infected through surface. By this logic you should spray sanitizers everywhere all the time.
- ohgodplsno 6y agoRight, how could I forget being pedantic and thinking that pushing arguments to their logical extreme is an argument in itself. This is HN after all. Disinfecting and cleaning your hands (even with soap. Noone's told you to douse your hands in alcohol every hour of the day) is as much for your protection as it is for others. Additionally, you can expect an average person to wash their hands maybe three to four times a day. Considering we have doctors and nurses that do this on the order of tens of times a day (and they all do it with hydroalcoholic solutions, which is the one thing that will damage your hands), the pretend harm caused to ourselves is bullshit.
- alcover 6y agoThat was pedantic indeed, sorry. My main concern really is the over-cleaning of surfaces. Those products are nasty.
- aksss 6y agoThis. I’ve enjoyed public accommodations/shared spaces paying more attention to hygiene. I’m disappointed that they may revert after numbers decline. I don’t mind masks preventing people from spitting on you when they talk, nor airlines filtering air better or restaurants attempting to clean their environment better. All for the betterment of our experiences, though who knows - we may all develop weaker immune systems in the long run. Remember when there was talk of the harm from overusing disinfectants? Haven’t heard that in a while, but I’m sure the impacts are no less true today. Kids who grow up with dishwashers in the home have more allergies. Maybe kids born in late 2019 will have some interesting immune system impacts.
- asplake 6y agoNot a great headline. What if I touch thousands of surfaces? Better (and based on the text): Few SARS-Cov-2 transmissions reported to have been via surface transmission. And note: However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission. Probably not many.
- mninm 6y agoPlus the report is referring to incidents of contact with contaminated surfaces not some random individual surface.
- divbzero 6y agoEven better would be using the article’s actual title: [1] “SARS-CoV-2 and Surface (Fomite) Transmission for Indoor Community Environments” [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- em500 6y ago> What if I touch thousands of surfaces? According to the article, that's probably risky if all of those thousands of surfaces are infected. But you make a good point: I have no idea how many infected surfaces I touched last week/month/year.
- jjk166 6y agoBeing somewhat conservative, recently in the US there have been an average of around 75000 new cases of covid reported per day. Let's assume there's a 14 day window of infectivity (in reality this period is shorter but there are also unreported cases) so there's a little over 1 million people in the US who can infect surfaces at any given time. Pretending for a moment that these are evenly distributed, that's a 0.3% chance of any given person having covid. If a surface remains infected for 3 days, that would mean that 230 people would need to come into contact with it every 3 days for it to have a 50% chance of an infected person coming in contact with it. This would average out to 77 people per day. If 1000 people traffic a location over an 8 hour day, the odds that an infected person has contacted the surface in the past hour are around 31%. Now the odds of a an infected person actually contaminating a surface they touch are probably lower still, but this would seem to indicate most surfaces in public places have significant likelihood of being unsafe.
- hashhar 6y agoThe headline is very misleading. The actual text contains the relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is considered low compared with direct contact, droplet transmission, or airborne transmission 1, 2. However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission.
- abtinf 6y ago“Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.”
- cortic 6y ago120 items on my average delivery, assuming a driver or stacker is infected that could mean every item is contaminated. I touch them 1-2 times to put them away, 3-4 times as i open and use the items.. So that could be 720 'touches', and that may be cheating as i am counting my many fingers as 1 and i don't live alone. So each contaminated delivery could risk infection as much as 1 in 14 (10,000/720). Through this pandemic i have had 21 deliveries. The twenty minutes it takes to wash them seems a very reasonable precaution.
- pbourke 6y agoDo you also sanitize your door knob, handle, pantry door handle, fridge/freezer handle, faucet controls, etc? Merely washing your hands when you’re done stowing items seems to be a better strategy. Also it doesn’t stand to reason that you treat each item in your grocery delivery as having disjoint probability of harboring infectious virus. That’s clearly not true in the real world.
- cortic 6y agoI sanitize the items in the garage, as i fill a sanitized crate, then my hands, then lift them into the house. Its quick and easy, it also allows me to reduce contact with the driver. To be honest i massively underestimated how often i touch some of these items in the first few days, coffee jars alone get touched 40+ times, jam and butter 12+, bread 18+, diluting squash 14+. even if i wash my hands after stowing away and subtract that number I'd probably be left with an average number of touches well over 6 after stowing.
- phs318u 6y ago"Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass." These are typical surfaces found on public transport, shopping malls, food courts. Three days allows for a lot of traffic to pass through and potentially come into contact with the infected surface. Of course, if the infection is coming from someone who is at that location on a daily basis (works there, takes the same bus/train each day) then the 3 days stretches out because surfaces are getting re-infected while the person is infected. Given that in densely populated areas such locations can get hundreds to thousands of people passing through each day, 1 in 10K may still translate to 1 infection every few days for a given "location". Each of those people would likely infect whoever they cohabitate with. So, while surface transmission is very low, it's not nothing, and can translate to real numbers in short order. You may read the above and say "so what?". I should point out that I'm based in Australia, and the way we've handled the COVID situation and the numbers we've had and are having, means we are generally pretty highly sensitised to avoiding the kind of shitshow happening in most of the rest of the world. The numbers you are seeing in your countries are horrific to most of us.
- imoverclocked 6y agoI'm in the US and the death toll is horrific for me to think about. Nobody is perfect but certainly our previous leadership did a great job of proving just how critical it is that world leaders understand or at least believe in science and facts. I've seen some Australian news outlet coverage via YouTube and can draw some pretty close parallels to a well known news outlet ironically named after a clever animal in the US. In my mind, this means the seeds of misinformation and a rise in the same kind of political environment are quite possible there too.
- sjg007 6y agoMurdoch runs the same playbook in the US, UK and Australia. He’s an Aussie.
- a-saleh 6y ago
- kirillzubovsky 6y agoSigh...
- staticassertion 6y agoThe reason why people react negatively to those who have been bringing up this sort of thing is that it always comes with this nonsense at the end: > They are hiding, scared, waiting for the government to officially announce that it is once again safe to return to the world. If it were a leveled discussion of facts, without the obvious agenda and judgment attached, people would not react so negatively.
- cheeze 6y agoAgreed. Just comes of as disengenuous and "wake up sheeple"
- jariel 6y ago? Or likely the complete opposite in that most people don't have access to the direct science, nor have the ability to translate it into policy, and we rely on institutions and the medical community to set up the basis for behaviours, that COVID is real, it's literally killed 550 000 people of all ages in just 1 year, that anyone can get it, and that it's rational to follow the advice until indicated otherwise. And finally 'we don't really know' the specific nature of transmission and it's rational (and low cost) to be safer than sorry, and to wipe down surfaces.
- verall 6y ago> They are hiding, scared, waiting for the government to officially announce that it is once again safe to return to the world. Would you believe that many of us are not scared, but rather that we decided based on facts about aerosol transmission that nonessential travel/social events put other people's grandparents at unneccesary risk?
- _Microft 6y agoThere is a disease going around. It transmits by droplets that you cannot see. People can be infectious before showing symptoms or without symptoms at all. It affects some people at lot more than others. I don't blame people for being scared. The winning move actually is not to play the social game for a few months. Currently, the best people are the ones you do not meet at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tlhunter 6y ago> Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.
- kungito 6y agoCan we then change the title to "Contact with ... contaminated surface.."
- zo1 6y agoWe're still sanitizing and/or quarantining everything that comes into our house from an unknown source. It's become a easy routine/habit anyways, and I've started to like that everything in our house is clean and I don't have to worry about it (have you seen how dirty groceries are?). Also, it's been the year of absolutely no flu, stomach aches and other various illnesses that afflict us in a seemingly random fashion.
- atat7024 6y agoJust get UV lights, that's a lot of labor.
- aksss 6y agoThe lack of additional sickness may have more to do with not having your kids rolling around in slimy Petri dishes with other kids, or being around coworkers whose kids are doing the same. In other words, isolation does wonders for avoiding infectious diseases, kids and their parents are a major transmission vehicle that you’ve also likely reduced contact with over the last year.
- cblconfederate 6y agoIf you needed to know everything about the pandemic, all you needed to listen was Michael Osterholm's interview in Joe Rogan podcast before the pandemic began. I m sure people would be a lot better prepared about the duration of the pandemic, the mode of transmission, the death rates etc if the epidemiologists had been frank about what to expect from a SARS pandemic. "Do not exchange air" should be an international slogan. Washing hands and groceries is just another security theater
- postingawayonhn 6y agoI like the term 'public health theatre'.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hyko 6y agoWashing hands is basic hygiene, definitely not theater.
- YarickR2 6y agoSo handshakes are safe and there's no need to perform this awkward elbow bump anymore
- dangero 6y agoThis could explain why Orange County, Florida has relatively low transmission rates in spite of Disney World being open to hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly outdoor parks, social distancing rules, masks required, but lots of shared surfaces.
- the_gipsy 6y agoAgainst the argument of "it doesn't hurt to disinfect": it does have some negative effects. Businesses have "installed" sanitizers and clean a bit more often. Correct air ventilation is mostly too costly, too inconvenient or outright impossible. But since the business is already doing _something_, "complying", there is a false sense of security.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DrBazza 6y agoWhere does the "1 in 10,000" come from in that paper? It seems like it might be from papers '7,8, and 9' in the references. Otherwise it's a number plucked from the air. Whilst there's no doubt you could catch from touching a surface, it's a respitory disease that you catch by breathing in water droplets contaminated with the virus. Wash your hands, fine. Leaving your shopping in the garden or spraying with bleach? Seems a touch hysterical to me. And I say that as someone that was in a high COVID area, grocery shop frequently, and still haven't caught it from touching a tin of beans on a shelf.
- arisAlexis 6y agoYou can touch many of those surfaces per day thoughso perspective and stats is everything