How Are We Possibly Still Disinfecting Things?
Two weeks into the pandemic, a box of Cheerios sent me into an existential tailspin. I’d just returned from an unnerving trip to a New York City supermarket, where bandanna-masked customers with carts full of toilet paper dodged one another like bandits. As I unpacked my groceries, I was gripped by fear. If I don’t Lysol the living daylights out of this cardboard, I wondered, will I die?
I kept up the cleaning for weeks. My garbage bin, like so many in America, turned into a disposable-wipe repository. It took until May 2020 for the CDC to confirm that the coronavirus is rarely transmitted by touching things. My Cheerios boxes became markedly less soggy, but even then, other, more public surfaces—elevator buttons, subway poles, shopping-cart handles—remained in a continuous wash cycle. I knew this because signs everywhere told me they had recently been cleaned.
Today, it’s well understood that because the coronavirus spreads through the air, good ventilation and air filtration are far more effective at disrupting transmission than wiping down surfaces. Best practices for after has found that the risk posed by lingering virus on surfaces is low compared with the threat it poses in the air.
