Coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the media and social media has prompted two equal and opposite irrational errors.

One denies the reality of the disease. It regards any measure to protect the public as an intrusion on personal freedom. The other insists on measures not supported by CDC recommendations. Prompted only by craven fear, they are leading to environmental disaster.

The CDC explains the transmission of COVID-19 and recommends prudent practices to keep us safe. Newspaper and television coverage—and especially social media posts—fail to convey them accurately.

Faulty, and even dishonest coverage encourages fear of COVID-19 and prompts imprudent and unnecessary practices. And as a result, an avalanche of trash.

Transmission of COVID-19

The coronavirus spreads through respiratory droplets, called aerosols. When an infected person breathes, the exhaled air contains airborne particles that can remain suspended in the air.

They can also travel through the air—especially if the person coughs, sneezes, or otherwise expels air with greater force than ordinary exhalation.

The CDC describes three possible ways to transmit the virus: close contact, airborne transmission, and surfaces

Close contact means being within six feet of an infected person for a length of time. At first, the CDC specified 15 minutes. Later, it turned out that people can get infected in less time than that. And it doesn’t have to be all at once, either. People have gotten sick by being close to an infected person for a cumulative total of 15 minutes over the course of a day.

Airborne transmission means exposure to droplets that remain in the air after the infected person has left the area. That is, people can get the virus without being within six feet of an infected person. But close contact infects many more people than airborne transmission.

Droplets obey the laws of gravity. Eventually, they fall out of the air. But that means they fall on surfaces. It is, therefore, possible to contract COVID-19 by touching an infected surface and then touching one’s mouth, nose, or eyes.

But, the CDC notes, “Spread from touching surfaces is not thought to be a common way that COVID-19 spreads.”

Not everyone who contracts the virus ever exhibits symptoms. In any case, it takes time after exposure for symptoms to appear. But an infected person can infect others even without symptoms.

CDC guidelines for protection against COVID-19

Since close contact is the primary means of spreading the disease, avoiding close contact is the primary means of protecting ourselves and others. Keep a distance of at least six feet as much as possible. In most cases, the virus won’t travel farther than that, but it can.

Wear a face covering. It blocks air both at exhalation (protecting others) and inhalation (protecting the wearer). With a mask, the aerosols travel a significantly shorter distance even in the case of a cough or sneeze.

Indoor environments that lack good ventilation present more risk than either outdoors or well-ventilated rooms. Air movement disperses the virus.

Although the likelihood of contracting COVID-19 from touching surfaces is low, frequent handwashing with soap and water offers important protection. So do hand sanitizers with at least 60% alcohol.

Clean visibly dirty surfaces. Then, disinfect them.

What’s the difference? When you wash a counter or something with soapy water, you remove germs from the surface, but you don’t kill them. Disinfection requires chemicals that kill germs. There is no point in disinfecting before or instead of cleaning.

Additional facts about COVID-19

COVID-19 appears to be deadlier than the flu, but other viruses—including Ebola, Bubonic Plague, and Smallpox—have a much higher mortality rate. In fact, more than 80% of cases of COVID-19 have only mild symptoms.

You probably won’t get COVID-19 from someone touching you. You are more likely to get it from touching yourself. On average, people touch their faces 90 times per day. Advice not to touch your face seems unrealistic. We all do it without thinking about it. But when you wash your hands or use hand sanitizer, your clean hands won’t transfer the virus.

Handwashing with soap and water is more effective at eliminating contagion than alcohol-based hand sanitizers. So using hand sanitizer after washing your hands adds no protection. When you wash your hands with soap and water, all the germs get caught up in the lather and wash down the drain when you rinse them. Hand sanitizer kills germs, but it takes about two minutes for it to get them all.

Alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and bleach all kill the virus on surfaces. But use one or another. Never mix them.

Dishonest and misleading politics and media coverage of COVID-19

News organizations frequently mention that getting sick most likely occurs when people get within six feet of an infected person.

They hardly ever mention the length of time it takes. Passing close to someone for a few seconds poses no danger. Even indoors. Unfortunately, the news coverage obscures that fact. Actually, it seems that generating fear of  COVID-19 is one of its goals.

And so someone wrote a letter to my local newspaper complaining that he had seen cyclists in the park who were not wearing masks!

I have, too. I like to walk on trails in the woods, and some double as bike paths. Shortly after seeing that letter, I encountered a train of five maskless cyclists. They were more than six feet from each other. How could they avoid it? I could not get six feet off the path, but they all were past me in maybe 15 seconds. They were outdoors, traveling sufficiently fast to create the equivalent of a strong breeze.

I have seen numerous articles that quote the CDC to the effect that it’s possible to become infected through touching contaminated surfaces. They neglect to add that the CDC says it’s unlikely.

News outlets breathlessly report studies that show how long the coronavirus remains viable on various surfaces. On some surfaces, it survives for a matter of days. But the CDC reports, “transmission of novel coronavirus to persons from surfaces contaminated with the virus has not been documented.”

Media-generated fear causes organizations to go far beyond CDC guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s called “abundance of caution,” which is nothing more than a polite way of saying craven fear. And these policies are creating an environmental catastrophe.

Here are some especially hazardous ones:

Masks

The CDC recommends disposable masks. After all, they work. In fact, it’s the top recommendation.

On the same page, it recommends breathable fabric, such as cotton, so long as it’s tightly woven and doesn’t let light through. The recommendations are based on efficacy. Nowhere does the CDC suggest a preference for disposable masks.

Once, when I visited a grocery store, a clerk was handing out disposable masks to anyone who didn’t have one.  She, too, was wearing a disposable mask. She told me that she prefers reusable, washable masks, but company policy forbade her to wear one at work!

The world was pouring plastic waste into the oceans at an alarming rate even before the pandemic hit. How much has the pandemic added? From the end of February 2020 through mid-April, the UK alone went through more than a billion masks, gloves, hand sanitizer bottles, and other personal protective equipment. At that rate, they’ll generate more than 66,000 tons of additional plastic waste over the course of a year.

How many more billions of single-use masks, gloves and packages has the whole world used as the pandemic has stretched for months and months? And too many people are too lazy to dispose of them properly. Who hasn’t seen parking lots and sidewalks littered with masks and gloves?

They’re ending up in the ocean. We risk pouring so many masks into the ocean that they’ll outnumber jellyfish! Fear of COVID-19 will do more lasting damage than the disease itself. It’s an environmental disaster.

Drinking fountains

Public drinking fountains have been turned off all over the country. But most places will be happy to sell bottled water. Water in single-use plastic bottles that haven’t been properly recycled even in the best of times.

I took my dogs into a Petsmart, and one of them was obviously thirsty. Usually, the store had a bowl of water on the floor by the drinking fountain. But now, the fountain was turned off.

The store supplied Styrofoam bowls that could be filled from the restroom. And had a sign instructing customers to put them in the trash when the pet was through drinking. Wasn’t plastic waste already causing enough environmental disaster?

Drinking fountains send up water at an angle. They have a guard to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to touch the fixture with their lips. They’re designed, in other words, for maximum safety.

“There is no evidence showing anyone has gotten COVID-19 through drinking water, recreational water, or wastewater. The risk of COVID-19 transmission through water is expected to be low.”  All drinking water, whether from the tap, a drinking fountain, or a plastic bottle, has been disinfected.

So why turn off drinking fountains? Fear of COVID-19, or fear of customers’ fear. Maybe people are afraid that someone has previously touched the knob or lever that turns it on. And if some company doesn’t exhibit proper fear, it will lose their business.

And my dogs?

A small number of cats, dogs, and other pets have become infected with the coronavirus. They get it the same way people do—from close contact with an infected person. The risk of getting the virus from a pet is therefore not zero. But it’s close, given how few cases of infected pets have been reported. They’re in more danger from us than we are from them.

A bowl of water on the floor will not make the virus airborne no matter how long it stays there. Corporate craven fear.

Reusable grocery bags

There’s one grocery chain I no longer patronize. An employee forbade me to enter the store with my reusable bags. I have seen on Facebook that some people just tell the clerks to put their purchases back in the cart with no bags. But I wrote to corporate headquarters to say they had forfeited my business. I will not set foot in their stores until my bags are welcome.

Improper disposal of plastic bags causes more environmental disaster than most other plastics. They can get tangled in streams and cause local flooding. Or make it worse than it would otherwise be.

The plastic and fossil fuels industries have been trying for years to promote the idea that reusable cloth shopping bags are unsafe. Fear of COVID-19 merely provides an additional excuse for them to promote junk science.

Yes, germs are detectable on cloth shopping bags. But only common and benign ones. Tests show that the coronavirus remains viable on plastic surfaces longer than on fabric.

There’s a simple solution to germs in cloth bags: Launder them from time to time. All the germs will go down the drain with everything else the detergent removes from the load. Whatever might be left will not survive the heat of the dryer. But even air drying won’t leave pathogens on the bags, because they probably won’t have any left after the washing machine drains.

Food  takeout

For a while in many states, no one could go to a restaurant to eat. That meant that all restaurant food came in disposable, and not necessarily recyclable plastic containers.

Restaurants also gave out straws and plastic table service with everything unless patrons thought in advance to ask them not to. It didn’t do any good to open the bag and give that stuff back. They threw it out rather than give it to someone else.

Although in most places, restaurants can serve customers indoors now, some fast-food chains still haven’t opened their dining rooms. Anyone who wants their food must use the drive-thru. There, people sit in long lines getting zero miles to the gallon and breathing each other’s exhaust fumes. I’ll be happy to patronize all my old haunts as soon as I can to inside to get the food.

Even after restaurants reopened, some served food to their indoor customers on disposable dishes. Why?

Heat kills the virus at a temperature of 140º F. Cooking food and washing dishes—especially in a restaurant dishwasher—easily reach that temperature and maintain it long enough. There would seem to be more danger of spreading disease from plastic takeout dishes, which never experience that temperature.

But fear of COVID-19 prevails. Don’t let facts and science get in the way. People sitting in boardrooms, immune to any complaints from discerning customers, mandate wasteful policies.

Panic disinfecting

I was at a Walmart recently. The employee pushing a long line of carts back into the store paused to spray disinfectant on all of them. They completely blocked the roadway in front of the store and three cars lined up waiting to get through. Idling, of course, and spewing pollutants into the air.

The CDC does recommend cleaning and disinfecting surfaces, but have we taken it too far? Early in the pandemic, disinfectant wipes disappeared from store shelves. Some people bought way more than they needed. Other people, perhaps just a few minutes late, had to trudge from store to store trying to find some.

But now we have people disinfecting all of their groceries as soon as they get them home. It might make sense in some cases. Other infectious diseases haven’t gone away. People at high risk of serious complications from any kind of infection need to take special precautions. Most people don’t.

It is certainly possible for someone to contract a disease from touching a contaminated surface. But since the CDC has said they can’t document anyone getting COVID-19 that way, it seems unlikely. So spraying disinfectant on all those carts probably didn’t give any added protection to anyone.

So what’s the problem with disinfecting when it’s not really necessary?

For one thing, consider the volume of used wipes that enter our landfills (or parking lots, streams, and oceans). For another, probably nothing kills all germs. We have known about resistance to antibiotics for a long time now. Wouldn’t it be a true environmental disaster if fear of COVID-19 unleashes germs immune to our common disinfectants?

Let’s step back and distinguish between necessary steps to protect ourselves from the virus and steps motivated only by fear. The public health benefits of too many practices and policies are somewhere between negligible and non-existent. The environmental disaster they’re causing will be with us forever.

Sources:

Pages from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, viewed November 19, 2020:

Cleaning and disinfection for households
Clinical questions about COVID-19: questions and answers
Considerations for wearing masks
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): frequently asked questions
Drinking water
How COVID-19 spreads
If you have pets

Other sources:

Coronavirus: separating the facts from fear / Singing River Health System (Mississippi)
COVID-19 frequently asked questions / US Food and Drug Administration
Foodservice cleaning and hygiene in the age of COVID-19 / Steve Starr, QSR Magazine. April 2020
How face masks, gloves and other coronavirus waste is polluting our ocean / World Economic Forum
It’s official: reusables are safe during COVID-19 / Joseph Winters, Grist. June 26, 2020
Wiping down groceries? Experts say keep risk in perspective / Candice Choi, Associated Press. November 25, 2020