Not in my area. That is, scientists here would beasically say: we don't know yet how well surface transmission works, so better take precautions. Which in hindsight still is the best approach in my opinion. Took a couple of months (IIRC) before it became well-accepted that chances (while existing) were fairly low. Not sure, but 'free and open' debate sounds like you want to have laymen have their say in things like this which is, again in my opinion, a bad idea. Only biologists/chemists/virologists/... have the fundamental knowledge it takes to reason about this without making mistakes. And between them there definitely was a debate, and they came to the same conclusion.
All that really bought me was seeing the 'debate' was between people that knew far less than the little I knew. Worse what most of what they thought they knew was wrong.
The big mistake was assuming that this new virus is just like this other virus they were more familiar with. Lay people and a lot of doctors used influenza as a model. Wrong. People who knew better thought the virus would behave like a not as bad SARS-Covid1 or MERS. Also wrong[1].
My conclusion a year ago was the best strategy was to take all the precautions until further notice. I thought of the doctors quip that the problem with medicine is half the treatments we give patients doesn't work. The real problem is we don't know which half. Taking all reasonable precautions then is always the correct answer.
[1] Public heath officials in the west[2] assumed that SARS-Covid2 only spread between symptomatic people like MERS and SARS-Covid1 does. That bit them on the ass but hard.
[2] Public health officials in China highly suspected asymptomatic transmission early on. But western officials categorically dismissed Chinese researchers opinions. (Big mistake #2)
How is that possible?
There is little debate in the matter.
How do you think the science is done? The first step is to debate these things, to figure out possibilities and design experiments.
I don’t agree with that as a way to run policy that affects real people living their lives.
And how this new information is supposed to reach everyone without being twisted? I heard so much crap being said by doctors, scientists, professors etc. Not just hyperbole, and assumptions, but downright misinformation. I'm in Poland and since the beginning of the pandemic there were multiple lies coming from both government ministers and all the people representing "science" I mentioned. Some examples of lies:
"Masks don't work to protect normal people",(later)"a piece of cloth is all you need", "children don't transmit the virus(then when a new wave of infections was partially caused by children returning to in person learning - ok we fucked up, children were infecting people all along, but we need parents at work not sitting with their children at home) ", "incidence of infection in the workplace is low (then after few months data came out showing 40% of all infections are in the workplace) etc etc.
Now a year later same" leading scientists" are still being invited by the media to answer questions. All available media lie more or less. In this environment how a "typical" person is supposed to know the truth?
I can find published research articles in reputable journals, and actual data to find out what is true, but I have no idea what advice to give to my friends and family who don't have that capability. When they ask me how do you know what is true. All I can say is "read everything and make up your own mind" which is pretty poor.
Everyone can do the math. With 100 contacts to contaminated surfaces the chance of infection grows to 0.01. If the chance to become infected per contact are just 1/2000 with 100 contacts the chances of getting infected are now 40%.
It makes perfect sense to maintain surface hygiene since those contacts accumulate statistically.
Actual risk is likely much lower, as you have to touch contaminated surface, then transfer the virus to nose, mouth or eyes. For public areas, properly worn masks help prevent part of the transfer too, by making it mechanically less likely, and giving more time for evaporation to inactivate the virus (e.g. by airflow)
Fomite infection risk would be higher if a contaminated surface is brought to a presumed clean area, with low ventillation, with no additional precautions taken by people.
P(getting infected per touch) = 1/10000 = .0001
P(not getting infected per touch) = 1 - P(getting infected per touch) = .9999
P(not getting infected after 100 touches) = P(not getting infected per touch) ^ 100 = .9999 ^ 100 =~ .99
P(getting infected after 100 touches) = 1 - P(not getting infected after 100 touches) =~ .01 = 1%
Or, in other words:
1 - ((1 - .0001) ^ 100) =~ .01 = 1% chance of infection
By the same logic, your second estimation is a bit off:
1/5000 = .0002
1 - ((1 - .0002) ^ 100) =~ .02 = 2% chance of infection
That's a far cry off 40%.
To think about it another way, if the chance to get infected per touch is 1/10, and you touch a surface 20 times, is your chance of infection 200%? No, that doesn't make sense. It's 1 - ((1 - 1/10) ^ 20) =~ 87.8%.
That's the problem with statistics -- "everyone can do the math", but it's pretty easy to mix it up and reach the wrong conclusions and spread misinformation.
This sounds like gamblers fallacy to me. The number of trials doesn’t change the probability of individual trials in this case because each trial is statistically independent, I saw no mention of e.g. accumulating viral load via successive surface contacts.
From the article, emphasis mine:
> each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/playground-safe...
Doing it in a snarky way is particularly not cool.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Obsessively cleaning bags from the grocery store and cereal boxes may not be the explanation for why your COVID experience seems saintly compared to contiguous regions with 10x the population and 40-50x the population density.
Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS.
All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two isolated countries on the bottom of the planet, no land borders, no ferry traffic from neighbouring countries, low population density, and also largely self sufficient.
Stopping people entering and leaving AUS/NZ is trivial versus Europe or the USA. Shut down your borders for months and you've solved the problem. Do that in the USA or Europe, and you'll have empty shelves and chaos.
I remember Zeynep Tufekci ranting about a school where they had strict procedure for doing a weekly deep cleaning, but no guidelines on ventilation.
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.
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.
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.
“SARS-CoV-2 and Surface (Fomite) Transmission for Indoor Community Environments”
I haven't seen a single case of reported surface transmission.
There was this case in a New Zealand quarantine hotel, where they first suspected a rubbish bin lid, which the persons had touched 20 hours apart. But now they think it was air moving, by opening the hotel room door from the room to the corridor, and then to the next room, when that door was opened right after.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/apr/04/how-new-zeala...
Note the paper suggest the real rate could be lower. For instance, a 10^-5 risk per contact would mean <0.4% risk for 365 contacts.
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.> 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 [7], [8], [9].
How is that not only misleading, but "very" misleading? The headline appears directly in the text almost word-for-word.
And the conclusion I drew from the headline seems about right. At worst, I think someone could miss the context of "each contact" with a contaminated surface, but I still wouldn't call this very misleading.
EDIT: I mean if an infected postman gives you a package what is the ratio that you will get infected by direct contact versus the surface of the package? Assuming you won't wash your hands. 10:1?
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.
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.
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.
(Sorry for just pasting a link, but I think it’ll be more clear than any summary I could make.)
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.
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.