The Scourge of Hygiene Theater

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/

by mrfusion • 6 years ago

70 64 6 years ago

“People have prevention fatigue,” Goldman told me. “They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.”

This was the best quote from the article for me. In my experience as a casual news watcher, the messaging about the virus has finally unified into a simple, easy to digest one in the last month (masks help, continue to social distance, etc.). But for the first few months of this all the articles about Covid particles living on every surface for weeks and then the even more nonsensical stories about pets getting Covid thinned out the whole message so much that I empathize with people who didn't take it seriously.

umanwizard• 6 years ago

For what it’s worth, pets really can get covid. Especially cats. That’s not a nonsensical story; it’s a fact.

Other than that, I agree with the main thrust of your post.

darkerside4• 6 years ago

Facts can be nonsensical in context if they are sufficiently misleading or irrelevant.

thephyber5• 6 years ago

It's a little bit oversimplified, but technically true.

For what it’s worth, pets really can get covid. Especially cats. That’s not a nonsensical story; it’s a fact.

The CDC reports[1]:

A small number of pets worldwide, including cats and dogs, have been reported to be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, mostly after close contact with people with COVID-19.

Cornell School of Vet Medicine says:

Very importantly, there is currently NO EVIDENCE that SARS-CoV-2 can be passed from cats to people, so there is no need for owners to do anything that would endanger the welfare of their cats (i.e. relinquish to a shelter or abandon them) even if a cat is diagnosed with COVID-19.[2]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

[2] https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institut...

chrisjarvis2• 6 years ago

When the hysteria of "your dog is gonna get coronavirus too!" is spread on national news it dilutes the messaging to wear masks and social distance. It's a fact but arguably irrelevant in context.

cortic• 6 years ago

pets really can get covid

The issue i have with statements like this is that they convey a lot of false information; Within the general public definition of 'get covid' is 'dangerously contagious'. So unless you change that definition most pets can't get covid; As in most pets, either the viral load is so low they couldn't spread it or it manifests as a gastrointestinal disease and so wouldn't be contagious unless you eat the animal.

I see this often, people not being sensitive enough to the common definition of important words, or worse, purposely misusing words knowing the common definition will mislead people into thinking stories are more sensational and important than they are.

ibejoeb4• 6 years ago

I really couldn't disagree more with the notion that the messaging is unified. No science supports masking for the general population. New Zealand, which is touted as the gold standard (however ridiculous a comparison to anything else it might be) doesn't mask and advises against it: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/... (individual sources here https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/pages/revi...)

Scandinavia can't agree on policies. Americans are physically fighting each other over it, in probably the funniest overt display of criminal obedience.

It was fomites, so don't touch anything, and don't touch your face. Now there are no fomites, and definitely put a dirty rag on your face at all times.

I'd go back to 9/11 over this cluster fuck in a heartbeat.

vore• 6 years ago

New Zealand is not really the best example here given they have no community transmission: I can understand different scenarios having different recommendations.

darkerside4• 6 years ago

That link doesn't advise against mask wearing. I'd recommend you revise your summary or indicate where in the article you are reading that.

They are therefore not a substitute for basic hygiene measures and physical distancing, where possible and practical.

That was the strongest wording "against" that I saw. And that is the typical "no evidence" disclaimer, not an evidence of no proof or evidence of harm.

Your post is misleading. It takes a bulletin from a country where COVID had been essentially eliminated, and implied that it's guidelines are appropriate for others where infection is rampant.

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

There are a number of companies focused on making masks in the US. Anyone know the current sales figures?

Unless I am mistaken, NZ did not ask (=require) the general public to wear masks because the NZ government was primarily following information disseminated through the WHO as guidance.

ximeng• 6 years ago

Your link from NZ doesn’t advise against masks:

“Healthy members of the public may choose to purchase and wear a face mask, or make their own.“

Scandinavia is not a unified political entity. US in-fighting more worrying than funny.

pbourke2• 6 years ago

No science supports masking for the general population.

How’s this for science: look at the statistics for nations which had near-100% mask compliance (Taiwan, SK, Japan).

Look at the animal study on hamsters separated by walls made of surgical masks.

The resistance to masks in the US is just insanity.

thephyber5• 6 years ago

I found the Governor Cuomo daily presentations mildly useful, but would have preferred if they were more succinct. All of the others (White House, local news, cable news, most newspaper coverage) I could have lived without. The problem is that attention has become Tragedy of the Commons and no news organization wants to be the one that didn't get some eyeballs for their advertisers when people crave COVID information and certainty.

mistermann3• 6 years ago

This was the best quote from the article for me. In my experience as a casual news watcher, the messaging about the virus has finally unified into a simple, easy to digest one in the last month (masks help, continue to social distance, etc.). But for the first few months of this all the articles about Covid particles living on every surface for weeks and then the even more nonsensical stories about pets getting Covid thinned out the whole message so much that I empathize with people who didn't take it seriously.

The news reporting (and even some statements from authoritative bodies) on this has been not just bad, but I believe harmful. Months of "facts" reported in an over-confident manner, and subsequently discovered to be wrong, provides great soil for growing conspiracy theories, or just general mistrust throughout the public.

Considering the facts seem to be finally coalescing somewhat, is there a single authoritative (and well advertised) resource where USA residents can go to get a summary of the current guidelines and facts (preferably with supporting evidence, uncertainties fully disclosed), written in a form that people will actually read?

EDIT: Others are mentioning more screwups below, such as only the media focusing on reporting total infections. I've had the same complaint (the odd way a lot of the data is reported) even reading reports on the CDC website. Some people don't believe that this obviously flawed approach to informing people accurately is purely due to incompetence.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

We all know how this happens. Some scientist fails to out-rule some hypothesis, she honestly publishes "X may happen if Y", the news publishes "X could happen if Y!", some dude on the Internet will go around saying "We don't know X can't happen! You're a fool for thinking X can't happen! If you aren't acting as if X is guaranteed to happen, you are killing people".

And then everyone who is a positive conformist piles on.

Don't tell me, I know. "Immunity may not be real", "Masks may not work", "Nervous system damage may occur", blah blah blah. A bunch of people who don't understand that knowledge is a probabilistic thing.

Listen, I know you guys¹ are not prepared for low-information high-replication messaging because of how you're reacting to this but I've lived through two local epidemics before. It's always this way. And until the first time you're inured to The Echo Engine of people who know nothing but repeat things with increased artifacts, you'll believe them. It's just unfortunate that you did. No biggie. Being unable to tell truth from bullshit isn't a crime.

But for the love of God, don't join The Echo Engine.

¹ Why, Rene, do you consider yourself more prepared? Because I knew imperfection in mitigation is okay. Because when HN was busy telling me that the only masks that would work were N95 and higher masks, and only when worn by professionals, and only when discarded after 8 hours of use, I didn't listen. Because this isn't FOOF. Very few things in the world need perfection. Nature doesn't like the Heaviside step function that much.

nomel• 6 years ago

The Echo Engine

Just curious, why "engine"? Is it because the propagation is fueled by itself?

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

I thought it sounded cool because it makes echoes rather than just sits there passively. i.e. a participant won't just repeat this per encounter. They'll provide repeated pulses of information broadcast.

brigandish• 6 years ago

FOOF?

virtue3• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

Given the HN / tech context, possibly the Intel Pentium F00F bug, a floating-point precision error, though that is eff-nil-nil-eff not eff-oh-oh-eff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

I felt more prepared partly because early in my career I worked on control systems for industrial sterilization. So got to deal with people whose job it was to make sure nothing was alive after a product was sterilized. Nothing is important here because one thing you find is there is a huge variation in how tough germs are[1]. If you know anything, when you read what kind of virus covid19 is you think detergent works pretty good. Or better let whatever dodgy thing sit over night.

After that it's yeah avoid sharing air with people, if you have to. Take a page from gay men. Assume people are infected. So wear a mask and keep it short. Short because all these things have a dose threshold.

I have to admit given the above the whole which and what activity is safe vs unsafe[2] drives me insane. Because pathogens don't care about playing tennis, going on a date, your sisters baby shower. They have a route of infection and they'll exploit it.

[1] Like HIV and Anthrax to name two extremes. The first can't survive outside the bodily fluids at all. And the other's spoors infect hapless cows in places where its been eradicated 50-100 years previous.

[2] Question you see bandied about by gay men. Oh you think that safe? Would you do that if you knew they were positive?

9nGQluzmnq3M2• 6 years ago

The theatrical aspects are particularly visible when it comes to air travel and border control:

https://gyrovague.com/2020/06/12/covid-theater-the-upcoming-...

As a side note, I believe it's Bruce Schneier who came up with the term "security theater".

strken• 6 years ago

From your link:

So odds are a 7 or 10-day quarantine would also catch 99% of infections — but what bureaucrat would dare break ranks and suggest so?

From https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/journal-scans/2020/...:

97.5% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will exhibit symptoms by 11.5 days.
Monitoring people exposed to SARS-CoV-2 for 14 days for development of symptoms should be sufficient to identify 99% of cases or more.

As far as I can tell, a 7 or 10 day quarantine would not catch 99% of infections, and there's no evidence to suggest it would.

taneq3• 6 years ago

10 days should be more than enough incubation time to produce a positive test result if infected. A 10-day quarantine followed by blanket testing in order to leave quarantine would eradicate the virus.

ggm• 6 years ago

OTOH casual rates of enterovirus, norovirus are down, and I believe are used by epidemiologists to track likely adherence to isolating behaviours. So a side-effect measurement which helps understand risks in fomites and Covid-19 also is a public health story in itself: some of the more pernicious infection risks from not washing hands, touching contaminated surfaces has reduced significantly.

But, underlying problems with food infection (Salmonella, worms and parasites, off meat) have not improved, because they are not amenable to this level of community change, they vest in food handling behind the scenes which has always had an expectation of high cleaning burdens.

helen___keller• 6 years ago

Theater is what you get when your country isn't prepared to pay the (monetary, political, cultural) cost of actually effective policy.

spodek• 6 years ago

Another side effect: insane amounts of pollution and litter.

fiblye2• 6 years ago

That's my main concern too.

Right when people started taking plastic pollution seriously and progress was beginning to be seen, suddenly everyone is wearing cheap plastic fiber masks that litter the streets everywhere; food items are quintuple wrapped in plastic; plastic screens are up everywhere to separate people; and cheap, single use, hygienic items made of plastic and wrapped in plastic are being distributed like candy.

I'm worried that it'll take decades to cut down on it again.

wahern• 6 years ago

food items are quintuple wrapped in plastic

I'm not sure precisely what the balance of all evidence looks like in this particular case, but I suspect that plastic wrapping might be better able to harbor pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, than the skins of most fruits and vegetable, excepting perhaps leafy greens for the obvious reason of increased surface area.

From what research literature I have read over the years (regarding cutting boards, Influenza, Ebola, SARS, etc), it's my understanding that in general pathogens of all types survive longer or at the very least remain functionally transmissible longer on non-porous surfaces. Not just longer, but significantly longer, such as to make it a worthwhile consideration from a health & safety perspective where such a vector matters--which is probably rarely if ever. Even waxed fruits and vegetables might be better in this regard than plastic. If people prefer packaging to mitigate contact transmission (e.g. when people inspect loose items), brown paper bagging is the best route in lieu of some expensive, synthetic micromaterial.

I realize the packaging is to soothe paranoid shoppers, and plastic is the easiest way to do that. But perhaps someday the public will be educated enough to be more discerning regarding what plausibly helps and what doesn't, notwithstanding the lack of any substantive need.

kbenson• 6 years ago

Now if only we could get the media to report on useful statistics, rather than total number of cases between geographic areas that differ widely in size and population.

California's not even in the top 20% for new cases over the last 7 days per capita, and is barely in the top 50% overall per capita, but we have the most individual cases overall because we have such a large population. That it gets reported along with Florida every time there's a "new record" broken in new cases (gripe number two, for a similar reason) is just the media trying to make the headlines seem as relevant as possibly to the largest audience, even if it's more fear-mongering than useful.

refurb3• 6 years ago

This annoys me to no end as well. In my local area new cases are quite low, maybe 10 new cases in a population of 750,000.

Yesterday they mentioned a record number of new cases and a “potential hotspot”. The cases went up to 12.

war10252• 6 years ago

Now if only we could get the media to report on useful statistics

The website for my state [1] has a map with infection counts by county. The irritating thing about this map is it's total numbers since February. That tells me nothing useful in terms of how places are currently doing. You can click on individual counties and it'll give you the 14 day rolling total, which is pretty useful for seeing upticks and improvements.

But for whatever reason, we've decided that "number of people who ever got sick" is the benchmark we need to focus on. It seems completely unhelpful.

[1] https://coronavirus.iowa.gov/pages/case-counts

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

Even Wikipedia only gives cumulative counts for Iowa :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Iowa

thephyber5• 6 years ago

I hate to always blame the media because it's a chicken or egg problem. No news outlet wants to be the one to lose business because they increase the friction of their news consumption, so we all suffer from Tragedy of the Commons.

Sad truth: news readers don't read the entire article. News agencies craft news in the format that readers are willing to digest at scale (a very brave few stayed in long form publications, but they don't report daily). The important details that are relevant to you are nuanced and aren't subject to easy headlines and even if they are, the articles don't get clicks (for better or worse). They are in the body of many articles from the better outlets, but usually the quality content is behind paywalls.

Until we find a better news business model that doesn't incentivize news to optimize for clickbait and social media to optimize news feeds for maximum emotion, we are going to continue to suffer from Tragedy of the Commons in this space.

mistermann3• 6 years ago

The CDC could publish a single, authoritative dataset, accompanied by spreadsheet-like UI's, sensible and informative charts, with useful filtering. I would think that would be part of their mandate, to inform the public.

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

Worldometers have been pretty good in providing if not focusing on many of these values. You may have to dig into the display columns selector. Higher-level (country/world) reporting tends to be better and more consistent than regional local, as with most resources.

"Cases / deaths / tests per X people" have been added in the past week or so:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

FT's coronavirus page shows excellent country-level detail with recent trending. As is often the case, business press is better than general news organisations at quantitative presentation, and the small-multiples charts are particularly effective:

https://ft.com/coronavirus-latest

As is almost always the case for complex developing stories, Wikipedia exceeds virtually all conventional news organisations in synthesizing current knowledge. The COVID-19 / SARS-COV-2 pages have become a cluster of excellent information, from overview to detail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic

Organisation has evolved as well, with per-country stats now having its own page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country...

For the US, the page now begins with a county-level map showing new cases per 100k population over the preceding 14 days (preseently highly focused on southern states):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...

State/local pages vary in quality, e.g., Illinois similarly reports prior two weeks cases per 100k, South Carolina only total infections per 100k, again, by county for each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Car...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Illinois

There is also realtime rt values by US state: https://rt.live

And projections:

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

Few news organisations can or will provide useful quantitative or graphical information. Fortunately there are other sources.

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

A more complete set of COVID-19 informational resources†:

COVID-19 trends by region, country, state/province, U.S. metropolitan area, or U.S. county: https://outbreak.info

COVID-19 projections: https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

Financial Times Covid-19 tracker: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/

CovidTrends; New cases (weekly average) vs. total cases, by country: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

Worldometers Coronavirus live statistics: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

US realtime state Rt estimates and tracker: https://rt.live

The Economist excess mortality tracker: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...

Covid19 projections: https://covid19-projections.com/

Imperial College London Covid tracking 7 estimation model (US): https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19usa/

Our World in Data Coronavirus tracker: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus map (US): https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

ArcGIS visualizer: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d...

Rysiek's National comparison grapher: https://rys.io/covid/

________________________________

Notes:

† Some duplicates w/ parent.

js2• 6 years ago

Dupe, and why was this submitted via archive.org? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966727

dang• 6 years ago

We've changed the url from https://web.archive.org/web/20200727181916/https://www.theat... above.

Submitters: please post original sources. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Archive links are fine in the comments, but not as top-level (submission) URLs unless the original source no longer exists on the web.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

It's an old paywall bypass trick. Classic HN situation. Post w/o paywall bypass = comments on paywalls. Post w/ paywall bypass = comments on why bypass.

The Scourge of Hygiene Theater

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