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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

In Hong Kong, 1 of the transmission vectors for SARS and COVID19 is from sewage pipes in high-rise apartments. Body fluid goes into the drain and its droplets spread to floor above and below the infected unit's.

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https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2003/pr70/en/ This is a horrifying possibility. No evidence of it being an issue in NY - but dense old brick buildings...

Wow, I would have thought that a p-trap filled with water would have blocked gases from the drain waste vent system. What's going on here, do the vents not vent all the way to the top of the building but come out the sides of the buildings? Guess they'd have to at some point as the number of stories goes on and on.

Lived briefly in a NYC flat. One of the p-traps did not in fact function as intended. The details are unpleasant, so I'll leave them out.

Most likely an S trap then. They are no allowed due to the probability of self siphoning. Not to say an S wouldn't, but it's improbable.

It was a p-trap with a non-obvious hole the size of a nickel. Became obvious the first time I used a plunger. :-P

Anything about shared HVAC in apartment complexes?

Do they have open vent pipes or something?

In this instance it leaked at the seams.

[Edit] It was a mix / not sure -https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/18/i...

And the vent pipes leaked anywhere that someone cut the vent to make room in their bathroom — which the articles say was common. In principle, it's helpful to know that sewer fumes might allow covid to spread. But based on those two articles, the fact that many toilet / drain traps in that building appear to be dry, and given the hacked up state of that building's sewer and vent stacks, neither story clarifies how covid actually spread there. Nor should the reader assume the same is likely to happen in another building that conforms to building codes — unlike that one.

Source?

SARS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/18/i...

COVID19

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3051209/...

That's a newspaper article that doesn't even claim that C19 did spread in that manner, merely that people are worried about it. You presented it as a fact ("1 of the transmission vectors"). If that's all you are basing this on, please stop spreading misinformation.

Faecal oral transmission is an active research topic, but it does not appear to be a major infection vector. There is no evidence to date that this has occurred.

https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/modes-of-t...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/water.html

https://theconversation.com/we-dont-know-for-sure-if-coronav...

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