Cleaning Surfaces for COVID-19 Too Often May Be Unnecessary
According to mlive.com:
Obsessively cleaning surfaces to get rid of COVID-19 germs is typically unnecessary "hygiene theater" and may go more harm than good by contributing to a false sense of security, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
This makes me feel better already because my wife and I clean surfaces in our house way too often. We clean surfaces in our home several times a day. It's just knowing that the COVID-19 virus is out there and could possibly make it into our home that makes us both nervous.
So my question is, do we need to clean surfaces ten times a day to make sure everything is germ free?
Mlive.com tells us this:
"CDC determined that the risk of surface transmission is low, and secondary to the primary routes of virus transmission through direct contact droplets and aerosols," Vincent Hill, Chief of the Waterborne Disease Prevention Branch, told CNN during a CDC-sponsored telephone briefing.
The Centers for Disease Control passes along very good information so that we can all follow the same guidelines. If they tell all of us it's not necessary to over clean surfaces then that's good enough for me too.
Based on things I've read ever since this pandemic began, it's important to disinfect surfaces if anyone you know may have or had coronavirus symptoms.
Most people feel that they can get COVID-19 by breathing in droplets from the air but not by touching home or work surfaces.
Mlive.com sums it up with the following:
The briefing followed a CDC paper released two weeks ago that found the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface is generally less than 1 in 10,000, "which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection," the CDC paper says.
There you have it, you may now spend less time cleaning surfaces and more time social distancing.