Did 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.”
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.
How is that possible?
And I'm sure that not all came to the same conclusion. You can probably find some that think 5G is a major contributor. But a broad consensus forms, where people start to think of surface sterilization as somewhere between "not important at all" or "only mildly important" as a measure to prevent COVID spread.
But the precautionary principle means, until the evidence is in--- maybe using protective measures that are effective against other viruses is a sane thing to do until we know more.
No, but you also didn't specify the people taking part in the debate. So I just tried to interpret it and suggested 2 possibilities.
All biologists/chemists/virologists came to the same conclusion?
How is that possible?
Because it makes most sense. Note that the conclusion was not "the virus spreads by surface all the time". It was: "we don't know for sure (which was completely correct at the time), so better safe than sorry".
Those two assumptions don’t make sense to me, sorry.
I wanted to have heard from the biologists/chemists/virologists who had it right from the start. I don’t recall hearing all sides of the issue. Somebody out there surely saw this coming.
Actually I am not assuming anything. I clearly said I wasn't sure, which leaves the possibilities open.
assuming that every biologist/chemist/virologist came to the same conclusion
Not really, because I don't know every single scientist. I am still talking about the ones in my area. A couple of which I've talked to and those all agreed. And again: the conclusion at the start was not "there is high risk", it was "we do not know how high the risk is". The default mode of scientists is "we do not know" so I hope you see it's pretty easy for a group of scientists to all agree on that. Much, much easier than agreeing on something else because that requires thorough research. But basically you are right on this one: I obvisouly do not have hard evidence all possible scientists agreed they didn't know the actual risks for surface transmission, I just assume they all admit that.
I don’t recall hearing all sides of the issue.
There are many factors which influence that of course. Media in general can be problematic passing through everything.
Somebody out there surely saw this coming
Of course, but that still doesn't mean those people wouldn't agree with "we do not know for sure".
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)
Paper: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468
Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/world/europe/coronavirus-...
There is little debate in the matter.
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.
Shouldn't store B then be spending less money on "sanitary theatre" and can theoretically provide a marginally better service in ways that matter?
The federal government can spend however many billions of dollars for new TSA staffing and equipment, but that's because they're a monopoly in airline security. Not sure why in a free-market we'd have obviously sub-optimal outcomes like this.
(Sorry if this is naive, feel free to weigh in with harsh realities about how the real world works :) )
I don’t agree with that as a way to run policy that affects real people living their lives.
Because scientific guidance already involves debate within the scientific community, just with people actually qualified to debate it.
It seems some people are taken aback by their exclusion, but no one is stopping you from becoming a virologist and partaking in the debate.
Who were you thinking would be left to debate those guidelines when the guidelines are based on the debate of experts?
Guidelines change because the experts are still free to debate them, where there is little room for debate is following the results of said debate.
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And what on earth are you asking me how the guidelines from virologists went for when you're the one arguing for leaving room for debate against them?
One would imagine you'd have some very clear pictures of missteps that can't be excused by the fact we were trying to fight an unknown virus killing people at an alarming rate if you're saying there's room for debating if we should follow their guidelines.
I mean go look at the evolution of discussion on COVID fomite transmission yourself.
In March we were getting studies showing long lived presence of COVID in some form on surfaces for weeks, but there was debate on if those were actually infectious amongst experts.
By April here's a virologist pointing out that the results showing weeks didn't mean it was infectious:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronavirusfrontlines/2020/04/0...
And for those who will not read the article but will try to respond based on the url... the conclusion was still supporting possible transmission, just for days instead if weeks. And it was still recommending aggressive disinfection:
> This suggests that risk of infection from virus on objects or surfaces in the environment can be minimized by diligent cleaning and disinfection practices.
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The very nature of the guidelines is including the fact no all experts are going to agree, which is the point of an organization like WHO.
There is little room for debate in following what their guidelines. It's very easy to come up with armchair opinion showing how misguided that is where they were wrong, but their recommendations are based on accounting for the fact we had a global pandemic to deal with.
How do you think the science is done? The first step is to debate these things, to figure out possibilities and design experiments.
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
And it isn't. We know that the infection happens when enough active viruses appear on the mucosa cells of the host. We know that there are a lot of viruses in every droplet from somebody's nose or mouth. Imagine how much viruses somebody leaves on the surface if he wipes his nose with a hand, for example, and then uses that hand to handle some item.
Finally, we know how much time it takes for half of the viruses to become non functioning (half life) -- something like three days, it is, they remain in the similar numbers for quite a while on the surface. Multiple touches of the same surface on which there is certain number of viruses is nothing like a series of "independent trials."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/playground-safe...