[goodpoint]

Taking the mask on and off introduces risk of infection when touching it. And risk of forgetting to put it on when needed.

If you just keep it on you avoid the risks - and you get to breath less pollution and allergens as an added benefit.

[alex_smart]

How many people have have gotten Covid from fomite transmission so far? Last I checked the number of such confirmed cases varied from zero to one.

Meanwhile the entire globe has been anxiously sanitizing their hands and everything they touch for 18 months (a lot of people in my family were even washing the grocery produce with soap and setting them aside for one day before use). All this long, long after scientists had pretty much figured out that risks of fomite transmission of Covid were vanishingly small.

[pa7x1]

There is no scientific experiment in the canonical sense that could confirm it due to ethical concerns. Once it was accepted that aerosol transmission occurs, since it is a much easier form of transmission it's very easy to tag all infections as having occurred through aerosol.

Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing, others may have been fomites from the droplets...

In my humble opinion, all of those forms occur. Viruses are passive things, they travel in respiratory secretions of any size big enough to contain them. They will lay there doing nothing until they get in contact with a target they can couple to and start replicating. It's better to think of contamination as a probabilistic event modulated by some factors, likely-hood of the event, resiliency of the virus outside of the body under the conditions that lead to the event, etc...

I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard. It may be unable to infect after a few hours but that should be plenty of time for an infection to occur.

[goodpoint]

> I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard

Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection).

Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?

[alex_smart]

>but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks

That seems to have been the mindset behind authorities deciding not to disseminate this information to the public. But I am not convinced.

That argument only makes sense if people's ability to be cautious and attentive and disciplined in following rules is an infinite resource. You have given people multiple rules they need to follow to avoid getting the virus without informing them which ones are more important to follow than others. For example consider the two guidelines: don't meet people in indoor spaces and don't touch unsanitized surfaces. Both require similar amount of effort/discipline but breaking the first is thousands of times more dangerous than the other.

[alex_smart]

Except that it is proven that the risk of fomite transmission is extremely low. The chance of a transmission when you directly touch an infected surface and then touch your face is around 1 to 10^4.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

Just spending 15-20 minutes once talking indoors with a person, whose covid status you're unsure of, is more dangerous than not bothering with the whole surface cleaning, hand sanitizing theatre during the entire pandemic. I am not sure that most people appreciate this.

Your understanding of the virus is based on incorrect understanding of how the virus worked that people had in the first few months of the pandemic. This was exactly the point I was making. While the scientific knowledge improved, this information was never really communicated to the people.

[eminence32]

I do wonder if we'll continue to see elevated rates of hand-washing in the years to come (as people have started to make it a habit), and if that will correlate to decreased rates of common colds/flus.