Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

cdc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 146 posts

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#111

Post by cortic »

bgarbiak wrote: post #104
cortic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

120 items on my average delivery, assuming a driver or stacker is infected that could mean every item is contaminated. I touch them 1-2 times to put them away, 3-4 times as i open and use the items.. So that could be 720 'touches', and that may be cheating as i am counting my many fingers as 1 and i don't live alone. So each contaminated delivery could risk infection as much as 1 in 14 (10,000/720). Through this pand…

I’m not sure you can count the probability this way. Each touch is a separate event, and for each touch you have 1 in 10000 chance of infection. So, it’s 1 * 720 / 10000 * 720.

Maybe its not that accurate to count it that way, but 1 in 10,000 would mean to the layman that every 10,000 times you do this you should expect 1 case of C19, and i do this at least 720 times at every delivery. With more than 20 deliveries through the pandemic last year i have potentially touched 14,400 contaminated items which would practically guarantee a case of C19. Now i know not all of these would be contaminated, but i don't know which or how much. And since delivery drivers in my area rarely wear masks even at the house, i don't have a high amount of confidence in any delivered items.

-To be honest i massively underestimated how often i touch some of these items in the first few days, coffee jars alone get touched 40+ times, jam and butter 12+, bread 18+, diluting squash 14+.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#112

Post by aksss »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #13

Watch as HN takes its signature air of superiority and says "I called it last year it was so obvious smh". 1. Basic safety principles mean that as long as we're not sure, keep doing it 2. You may have been enjoying a year surprisingly free of common colds, of flus, and many more other illnesses. These are absolutely transmitted through surfaces, and increasing hygiene standards is the best way to get rid of them. Kee…

This. I’ve enjoyed public accommodations/shared spaces paying more attention to hygiene. I’m disappointed that they may revert after numbers decline. I don’t mind masks preventing people from spitting on you when they talk, nor airlines filtering air better or restaurants attempting to clean their environment better. All for the betterment of our experiences, though who knows - we may all develop weaker immune systems in the long run. Remember when there was talk of the harm from overusing disinfectants? Haven’t heard that in a while, but I’m sure the impacts are no less true today. Kids who grow up with dishwashers in the home have more allergies. Maybe kids born in late 2019 will have some interesting immune system impacts.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#113

Post by sjg007 »

imoverclocked wrote: post #43
phs318u wrote: post #29

"Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass." These are typical surfaces found on public transport, shopping malls, food courts. Three days allows for a lot of traffic to pass through and pot…

I'm in the US and the death toll is horrific for me to think about. Nobody is perfect but certainly our previous leadership did a great job of proving just how critical it is that world leaders understand or at least believe in science and facts. I've seen some Australian news outlet coverage via YouTube and can draw some pretty close parallels to a well known news outlet ironically named after a clever animal in the…

Murdoch runs the same playbook in the US, UK and Australia. He’s an Aussie.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#114

Post by aksss »

zo1 wrote: post #53

We're still sanitizing and/or quarantining everything that comes into our house from an unknown source. It's become a easy routine/habit anyways, and I've started to like that everything in our house is clean and I don't have to worry about it (have you seen how dirty groceries are?). Also, it's been the year of absolutely no flu, stomach aches and other various illnesses that afflict us in a seemingly random fashion…

The lack of additional sickness may have more to do with not having your kids rolling around in slimy Petri dishes with other kids, or being around coworkers whose kids are doing the same. In other words, isolation does wonders for avoiding infectious diseases, kids and their parents are a major transmission vehicle that you’ve also likely reduced contact with over the last year.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#115

Post by aksss »

thedevelopnik wrote: post #6
renewiltord wrote: post #2

We've known this for like a year, right? All the spraying and stuff is performative, like the brown M&Ms of COVID sécurité.

Hey, the brown M&M’s actually served an important purpose as a signal!

I loathe every time someone brings up the quirky neat trivia of brown M&M’s - it always results in ten comments trying to error-check the lore and one comment about how they loathe the whole exercise.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#116

Post by DrBazza »

aksss wrote: post #109
phs318u wrote: post #29

"Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass." These are typical surfaces found on public transport, shopping malls, food courts. Three days allows for a lot of traffic to pass through and pot…

You had me nodding along until last paragraph, where I can’t help but ask you to remind me what the population of AUS is, and the population density. Aren’t you also on an island with relatively harsh immigration policies? Obsessively cleaning bags from the grocery store and cereal boxes may not be the explanation for why your COVID experience seems saintly compared to contiguous regions with 10x the population and 4…

> Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS.

All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two isolated countries on the bottom of the planet, no land borders, no ferry traffic from neighbouring countries, low population density, and also largely self sufficient.

Stopping people entering and leaving AUS/NZ is trivial versus Europe or the USA. Shut down your borders for months and you've solved the problem. Do that in the USA or Europe, and you'll have empty shelves and chaos.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#117

Post by 0x72 »

cortic wrote: post #111
bgarbiak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you can count the probability this way. Each touch is a separate event, and for each touch you have 1 in 10000 chance of infection. So, it’s 1 * 720 / 10000 * 720.

Maybe its not that accurate to count it that way, but 1 in 10,000 would mean to the layman that every 10,000 times you do this you should expect 1 case of C19, and i do this at least 720 times at every delivery. With more than 20 deliveries through the pandemic last year i have potentially touched 14,400 contaminated items which would practically guarantee a case of C19. Now i know not all of these would be contamina…

It's around 23.69% if my math is correct.

I mean, it's not nothing, but I wouldn't say "practically guarantee".

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#118

Post by cortic »

0x72 wrote: post #117
cortic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe its not that accurate to count it that way, but 1 in 10,000 would mean to the layman that every 10,000 times you do this you should expect 1 case of C19, and i do this at least 720 times at every delivery. With more than 20 deliveries through the pandemic last year i have potentially touched 14,400 contaminated items which would practically guarantee a case of C19. Now i know not all of these would be contamina…

It's around 23.69% if my math is correct. I mean, it's not nothing, but I wouldn't say "practically guarantee".

A 23% chance of a 1 in 10,000 chance thing happening every 14,400 chances? That can't be right.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#119

Post by DrBazza »

Where does the "1 in 10,000" come from in that paper? It seems like it might be from papers '7,8, and 9' in the references. Otherwise it's a number plucked from the air.

Whilst there's no doubt you could catch from touching a surface, it's a respitory disease that you catch by breathing in water droplets contaminated with the virus.

Wash your hands, fine. Leaving your shopping in the garden or spraying with bleach? Seems a touch hysterical to me. And I say that as someone that was in a high COVID area, grocery shop frequently, and still haven't caught it from touching a tin of beans on a shelf.

Re: Contaminated surface has under 1 in 10k chance of causing an infection

#120

Post by phs318u »

DrBazza wrote: post #116
aksss wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me nodding along until last paragraph, where I can’t help but ask you to remind me what the population of AUS is, and the population density. Aren’t you also on an island with relatively harsh immigration policies? Obsessively cleaning bags from the grocery store and cereal boxes may not be the explanation for why your COVID experience seems saintly compared to contiguous regions with 10x the population and 4…

> Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS. All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two…

Firstly, population density of the whole country is irrelevant. Population density of urban centres (e.g. Sydney + Melb > 10M pop.), is comparable if not greater than many cities in the US. We are largely self-sufficient for most food stuffs. I assume most of the US is too (I doubt that closing your borders would lead to empty food shelves). But we are entirely not self-sufficient for just about anything that's manufactured (the bulk of which comes from Asia, mainly China). We shut our borders to people (mostly) not goods. We also had governments that were willing to make politically very unpopular decisions based on the advice they were getting at the time. And the more the outcomes diverged between what we were seeing and what the rest of the world was experiencing, it became less politically damaging to make those kinds of calls (even more so because there was largely bipartisan agreement on the macro decisions even if details varied across states).

I live in Melbourne and went through 2 multi-month lockdowns. The first was 3 months, the second was 5 months. It may be comforting to think that it was "trivial" for us to control the spread of COVID, but I assure you it didn't fucking feel trivial 5 months into the 2nd lockdown.

Post reply on HN