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Comment by DougN7 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know but I’ve become aware of just how difficult it is to remain pristine. Touch a door handle? After that did you touch your phone, keys or wallet at the store? Did you touch your car door handle? When you washed your hands, did you disinfect the faucet handle and soap dispenser after? It’s always a game of percentages even when you’re careful.

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In order to be infected from a door handle, somebody the last few seconds had to sneeze in his hand, touch the handle, you'd have to really touch the whole handle and then take the hand to your mouth/nose. It is unlikely. They find virus RNA on surfaces but it is not activate. Infections from surfaces are vastly overestimated. Staying and talking with an infectious person in a room is underestimated.

There's the simple expedient of 1) touching potentially contaminated stuff only with your left hand, 2) only touching clean stuff with your right hand, and 3) never cross contaminating your left and right hands. And whenever you can, wash or use 70% alcohol. When I'm out, I always carry a paper towel soaked in 70% isopropanol in my right hand, and periodically wipe my left hand.

There's a lot of history to this left hand, right hand protocol. I'm assuming you do it in this tradition, or at least as a nod to it?

Yes, of course.

I also have decades of muscle memory with using disposable gloves in a lab context, but that's not so useful when you don't have 100 gloves per day to burn through. But even so, I'm always conscious of what I've touched when, and with what.

That's the tough part - not touching things that other people touch or ensuring that you sanitize your hands after. A new CDC study claims this coronavirus can survive for hours on shoes, wall, floors, etc.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article

Like you say, it's a game of percentages. The only way to completely eliminate the possibility of infection to yourself personally is to stay inside and live off whatever you've managed to stock up on for supplies. Not exactly practical and likely not sustainable for long.

This would be an awesome opportunity for AR-based training.

Imagine being able to "see" the simulated virus in the air and on surfaces. See it spread due to airflow and gravity, see it diminish over time due to sunlight, surface cleaning, etc.

Yes. It's extremely hard. Clothes are especially hard. I have to take my dog out two times a day and I always try to use the same shoes and same hoodie for this activity. I wash them every other day, but that's a half-baked hygiene measure.

In reality, the only way to be safe is to always wash all your clothing every time you go out, but with a dog, I find that pretty hard.

> In reality, the only way to be safe is to always wash all your clothing every time you go out, but with a dog, I find that pretty hard.

Quarantining the exposed clothes is a better method IMHO, just setup a FIFO of quarantine bins. Add sunlight if possible. I've been using 2-3 days personally, depending on what it is.

I mean, you'd also have to wash your dog, right?

I clean his paws after we go out but yeah, the vectors of contamination are infinite.

Just brushing rapidly against any of those surfaces can potentially aerosolize it as well. Not to mention that the radius of air-borne transmission route keeps changing. And on top of that we haven't got a lot of data on other vectors like food.

> Touch a door handle?

Like... with your hand? Not in a glove that you throw out immediately? I just can't fathom touching a door handle.

I saw someone just open a door at a public place the other day and it was utterly baffling to see.

Billions of people in affected areas do it every day...

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