Editorials & Other Articles
In reply to the discussion: New study on Covid: Surfaces vs Airborne [View all]Igel
(35,390 posts)And nobody wants to make a claim that might be false, even marginally.
So the equivalent is showing that the rate of transmission by surfaces is vanishingly small.
You get that incidence rate down to the margin of error and poof! that transmission means isn't disproven but it's off the radar again.
Much was made of a case where a person (*a* person) caught COVID from an elevator button, supposedly. Except they couldn't rule out alternative means of transmission, since it was a residential building where they shared the elevator and presumably a lot of other things. Like air in the corridors, in the elevator, in the lobby.
Less was made of a large call center where scores of employees were in each of two rooms on either side of a central hall, with staggered lunches. They shared the hall, the elevators, the lunch room. They didn't share air or space, except in the elevators and hallway when reporting to work. One side had a large outbreak of COVID. The other side had no reported cases. If there was ever a controlled experiment for surface transmission, or short-term contact resulting in transmission, there you go.
The same sort of reasoning--hard to prove a negative, and it's unpleasant to say something's impossible just to find out it happens on rare occasion (which means it's possible)--is responsible for a lot of media confusion and a lot of what comes from the CDC.