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Comment by Naga | Hacker News Reader

All the surface cleaning was a massive waste? How about was and continues to be. At least where I live in Ontario, stores still won't let you touch products, require hand washing, wipe down all the carts, etc. It's all theatre that doesn't really do anything to stop the spread of covid but has the benefit of making it look like they are doing something.

Another example is that while schools are closed now again (because they aren't safe), the government until a few weeks ago was bragging about how safe schools were because of their extensive cleaning procedures, which did nothing to make schools safe since ventilation was the key!

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Maybe it was/is a dud for COVID-19, but there does appear to be many gains from this outside of COVID-19. Infectious diseases that ARE highly transmissible on contact has been dramatically reduced.

Am I suggesting we continue with this level of rigor for cleaning after the pandemic has ended? No. But it does highlight how much "healthier" we can be as a society with a little more emphasis on general hygiene.

It almost definitely reduces the spread of flu. I highly doubt it continues post-covid though. Some people seem to love the idea of wearing masks indefinitely though so I think we'll see more of that.

>But it does highlight how much "healthier" we can be as a society with a little more emphasis on general hygiene.

The counter-argument to this is that excessive hygiene also seems to (quite probably) cause health problems [0]. There appears to be some tension between protecting the weak and protecting the herd, so it's not at all clear that this increase in sanitization will ultimately be a net gain for public health (to say nothing of environmental impact).

[0] I leave it to the curious to run a few google scholar searches. "hygiene hypothesis" is a good start, pointing to relationships between excess (or more exactly, a wrong kind of) cleanliness and poor development of the intestinal microbiome.

You're definitely right, with the caveats that other posters have pointed out that there might be benefits from less cleaning as well. My big concern isn't that we're cleaning, but that we're cleaning too much and using that as a justification for doing less of anything else.

In Portland retail stores require you to hand sanitize every time you enter which becomes a bit cumbersome if you enter a few stores during a trip. And yes, the extra effort has a cost, because I've been told to sanitize in front of employees who are interacting with groups of customers at close distance (while masked tbf). At the end of the day humans have a small set of things they can juggle in their minds and that focus should be on ventilation, spacing, and masking instead of wasting focus on unnecessary surface cleaning.

There's a go-kart track near me... and they have someone who goes around after each session and sprays some kind of fog on the karts. I presume it's a "sanitizer" but if you look how sanitizers work, they still take time to act and it takes a decent quantity of it to work. Meanwhile the steering wheels are covered in pourous foam / plastic / rubber, which is soaking up everybody's sweat, germs and bacteria... and some how this fog, which is safe for the person spraying it to stand in, sanitizes the entire kart in under a few seconds and leaves behind no residue...

Still better are the two-person crews in full gear spraying this fine mist over airport lobby chairs and furniture (and people sitting nearby) while wearing enough PPO to look like late stage Chernobyl responders.

Security performance theater.

Perhaps they should add a mitred hat, some beads, a censer, and a droning chant...

Change it from theater to ceremony!

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