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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

> Our Clean Commitment was launched to keep every gate area, jetbridge and aircraft clean

> We’ve begun using new breakthrough SurfaceWise2 spraying solution

> We require everyone to wear an approved mask or face covering to reduce the risk of virus transmission

> We also offer extra wipes (where available) for customers to clean the area around them

I think the current science is that there is very little evidence of significant risk of transmission from surfaces. (3 of those 4 points).

Yet we are still obsessed with surface hygiene. I guess because it's something we can do... but if we spent all the money being spent on surface cleaning on things that actually are more likely to reduce transmission (like, say, ventilation; or even on research to learn more), we'd reduce transmission more.

Those things they are banning they probably have to ban for good reasons of safety etc. But surface hygiene is no substitute.

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Keeping things clean costs pennies and even if the reduction in the odds of transmitting covid aren't very high, it certainly helps with lots of other diseases, and for the vast majority of us avoiding the common cold or the flu is just as valuable as avoiding covid. A new ventilation system for a plane is many orders of magnitude more expensive and the amount of benefit it would provide is still questionable.

Reallocating such a measly sum to other areas is very unlikely to make a measurable difference. Infinitesimal costs can be justified by even very minor benefit.

NYC is spending $500M/year to clean rail and buses in an effort to combat COVID (https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/0...). It's not nearly as cheap as you would think.

Keep in mind that whatever the MTA does, you could probably do equivalently in a sane, rational world for 1/10th the price.

8 million people live in NYC, and between them and visitors from the surrounding metropolitan area a comparable number of people utilize the public transit system regularly. $500M/yr is 17 cents per person per day. I can think of less useful things I would pay 17 cents for.

There is such a thing as minimum wage. Flipping burgers, serving coffee or using a wipe all cost the same minimum wage. And that adds up fast...

How long does it take a team to wipe down a plane? 6 people 20 minutes maybe? That's $14.50 at federal minimum wage. There are 16 million flights per year when there isn't a pandemic reducing air travel, over 6 months that would be about 8 million. That would be 115 Million in labor for the worst case scenario max. There are about 30,000 airliners in the world, so the ventilation systems would have to cost $3800 or less to be cheaper than minimum wage labor. Realistically, such a ventilation system for an airliner is probably going to be more like $50,000; which would mean the units wouldn't break even until 2026.

By saying "break even" you are assuming that the ventilation system and the wiping down are equally effective -- so the question is which is cheaper?

That is not the case. It depends on their effectiveness. If wiping down reduces risk 4% but better ventilation reduces risk 70%, the calculation of "breaking even" is very different. We don't know these exact numbers for covid, but as best as we can tell the risk reduction of this kind of surface cleaning is pretty minimal.

It's hygiene theater.

Hiring someone to pray for health on the plane would be cheaper than actual effective measures too -- hey you could probably hire just one person nationally to pray for health on ALL planes, a bargain! 'at what point will actual effective measures "break even" with hiring someone to pray' is a ridiculous question.

Fine, by that metric, the ventillation would have to be 12 times more effective than wiping down to have the same cost/benefit ratio. So if the wiping is 8.4% or more effective than it will always be the cheaper alternative; and even if wiping is less effective than that, odds are the ventilation system is going to be far less than 100% effective.

And again, wiping surfaces does more than fight covid. The flu, the common cold, and countless more diseases are very effectively countered by washing down surfaces. If you make federal minimum wage and you miss work for 2 days because of the flu, that's $120 in lost earnings. The average person flying probably makes significantly more than that. Even if wiping down your seat only reduces the odds of getting the flu by 0.15% you're still coming out ahead at minimum wage; if you make $100k/yr it need only be 0.02% effective.

Also it's worth noting that contact with contaminated surfaces is still believed to be a major means of transmission of the disease. It is airborne transmission of covid which is still being debated though there seems to be mounting evidence in support of it as an additional transmission pathway.

I think you should not make such a statement without a citation. With a quick search I could not find any research that supports that claim and the CDC is still recommending surface transmission prevention measures (at the top of the list even).

I suspect you are confusing surface transmission potentially being the cause of a relatively small number of infections with it not being a significant risk.

How could it be a significant risk if it is the cause of very very few infections? I don't understand what you mean by this.

> In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

(july 27) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...

"Hygiene theater", like "security theater", is focused on appearances rather than actual calculated risk.

The question is how few cases. I would agree at some point extremely few cases would mean not a significant risk, but because single cases can potentially case the virus to be spread widely before they are noticed even fairly small numbers of cases could have a significant impact. Many potential surface exposures would overlap with potential airborne exposure and most places with many cases don't have sufficient contact tracing to really have any idea how a large portion of the cases are occuring.

I don't even disagree that much with you, Goldman, or the Atlantic article. Surface disinfection giving a false sense of security does seem like a major issue to me (and surface coatings and a number of other more extreme measures seem like a bad idea to me). However, I think you, the Atlantic author, and Goldman (unless misquoted, it seems he makes a different argument here than his Lancet article) are being unreasonably certain about it not mattering at all. It seems like the author could only find two people, both from Rutgers, willing to publicly support that argument. It seems like a pure ego thing to be so certain based on so little evidence and potentially quite harmful if not correct.

>I think the current science is that there is very little evidence of significant risk of transmission from surfaces.

We don't hear about fomites anymore because it's awfully hard to encourage mask use when you tell people that the mask itself is a risk.

In New Zealand we have had at least one confirmed case of a isolation facility worker catching it in an empty elevator.

Everyone entering the country goes into an isolation facility (repurposed hotel) covid or no covid.

> In the New Zealand we have had at least one confirmed case of a isolation facility worker catching it in an empty elevator.

We would love to hear more about this. Do you have an article?

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12251232...

Elevators are confined spaces with poor ventilation. How did they distinguish between catching it from elevator surfaces and catching it from aerosols in elevator air?

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