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Comment by hcknwscommenter | Hacker News Reader

Just speculating, but I think the idea that it is safer to have your groceries delivered (a necessity if you are not leaving property) rather than go to the grocery store yourself is just flat wrong. I know several (admittedly only three) people who have caught COVID but have not left their apartment and/or house since Jan.

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I am trying not to speculate too much how we got it but generally I agree. We used alcohol spray and bleach wipes on all our delivered groceries, but in hindsight it seems to me like the delivery drivers were the likely carrier.

In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.

Doesn't it stand to reason that delivery drivers would be in the grocery store as well?

Not sure what you are getting at here. I agree the delivery drivers are in the grocery store. They probably spend half their workday there and have to travel throughout the store many many times, each time navigating a different cohort of shoppers, and then come in contact with deliveree surfaces (doorbell, etc.) as well. The delivery driver has a dangerous job and is highly likely to get covid. When s/he does, so do all the deliverees.

I'm not disputing your practices, but I was in the same boat as you, then recently saw this article and have since relaxed a bit on some of the cleaning protocol we've been following: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...

The takeaway of that article is that cleaning surfaces to reduce the likelihood of contact transmission (which is close to 0), may detract from practices that reduce the likelihood of airborne transmission (which is close to 1.0 if you're near an infected person).

That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.

In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.

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