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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

This page keeps crashing on my phone. I can get down to the toilette flushing.

The idea seems solid, but a bit too alarmist, all told. Are there studies that show this has the right vectors? (For that matter, the paper to go on a toilette... There any evidence that is useful?)

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There was a infamous spreading event in an apartment block in Hong Kong where due to faulty plumbing some sewage went "backwards" from the sewer to toilets and a single person infected dozens. That was SARS

There were suspicions of SARS-CoV-2 transmission as well, but don’t think they’ve been confirmed.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...

Here’s a paper on the 2003 HK SARS toilet event, and applications to COVID-19. Gotta love science.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

regrettably the toilet infection vector is a known thing in epidemiology. it's called a "fecal plume" or "toilet plume".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4692156/

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nioshtic-2/20043244.html

Toilets vary more than you would expect around the world. Some countries have mostly high pressure, fast moving water designs, which I presume leave a lot of droplets in the air, while others have far slower more "swirly" designs that I suspect transfer less into the air.

It would be good to see research on this...

If you can get further down there are links to papers about specific infection instances, but none about toilets.

What part or parts did you find to be too alarmist?

The only part I could get to before a big banner blocking me was about toilets. Which, still seems overly frightening.

That all said, thanks to all for summarizing and giving links! Still not sure why the page wouldn't load, and happy/weirded out to get challenged on some of these.

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