It’s Okay to Be the Annoyingly Overcautious One
Scrubbing your doorknobs may not be the best defense against the virus, but don’t let that stop you
Safety guidelines seem to morph by the hour. Some measures, like masks, have taken on new urgency, but others that once seemed essential now feel less so. Hand-washing remains vital, but mounting evidence suggests that we probably don’t need to rub our groceries with cleaning wipes anymore.
And yet. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently explained, germ-laden surfaces have emerged as one of the pandemic’s biggest boogeymen. We know now that the virus spreads mainly through respiratory droplets, but many of us are still wiping down doorknobs twice a day and leaving packages outside to decontaminate. Restaurants and other public spaces are still reassuring customers of their regular deep cleans, despite the fact that no amount of scrubbing a tabletop can change the amount of virus emitted by the person eating off of it.
The real danger, Thompson argues, is this sort of “hygiene theater” — performative cleanliness that breeds a false sense of security. “By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals,” he writes, “we lose focus on the more common modes of Covid-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague.”
