“Our state’s future depends on educating these kids,” says Governor Kristi Noem.
Then she should shut up and stop lying about coronavirus.
Among the lies Governor Noem has told this week about public health is her continued assertion that washing hands is the best way to prevent the spread of coroanvirus.
That’s kind of like saying the best way to avoid getting herpes is to wash your hands.
Governor Noem is ignoring the fact that the main avenue of transmission of coronavirus is breathing, not touching, and that all our scrub-a-dub-dub, while certainly not bad for our health, may just be hygiene theater:
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.
…Scientists still don’t have a perfect grip on COVID-19—they don’t know where exactly it came from, how exactly to treat it, or how long immunity lasts.
But in the past few months, scientists have converged on a theory of how this disease travels: via air. The disease typically spreads among people through large droplets expelled in sneezes and coughs, or through smaller aerosolized droplets, as from conversations, during which saliva spray can linger in the air.
Surface transmission—from touching doorknobs, mail, food-delivery packages, and subways poles—seems quite rare. (Quite rare isn’t the same as impossible: The scientists I spoke with constantly repeated the phrase “people should still wash their hands.”) The difference may be a simple matter of time. In the hours that can elapse between, say, Person 1 coughing on her hand and using it to push open a door and Person 2 touching the same door and rubbing his eye, the virus particles from the initial cough may have sufficiently deteriorated [Derek Thompson, “Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time,” The Atlantic, 2020.07.27].
Governor Noem’s emphasis of hand-washing over the masks she has yet to be seen modeling in public distracts us from the most effective actions we can take to beat coronavirus:
…By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing” [Thompson, 2020.07.27].
We should be placing a priority on getting everyone to wear a mask in indoor public spaces. We should also be giving much more attention to ventilating those indoor spaces to reduce the viral load:
Last week, I walked around the public elementary school in my neighborhood while thinking about what we could do if we took aerosol transmission more seriously. It’s a single-story building, all the classrooms have windows, some have doors that open directly to the outside, and many have a cement patio right outside. Teaching could move outdoors, at least some of the time, the way it did during the 1918 pandemic. Moreover, even when indoors or during rainy days, opening the doors and windows would greatly improve air circulation inside, especially if classrooms had fans at the windows that pushed air out.
When windows cannot be opened, classrooms could run portable HEPA filters, which are capable of trapping viruses this small, and which sell for as little as a few hundred dollars. Marr advises schools to measure airflow rates in each classroom, upgrade filters in the HVAC system to MERV 13 or higher (these are air filter grades), and aspire to meet or exceed ASHRAE (the professional society that provides HVAC guidance and standards) standards. Jimenez told me that many building-wide air-conditioning systems have a setting for how much air they take in from outside, and that it is usually minimized to be energy-efficient. During a pandemic, saving lives is more important than saving energy, so schools could, when the setting exists, crank it up to dilute the air (Jimenez persuaded his university to do that) [Zeynep Tufecki, “We Need to Talk About Ventilation,” The Atlantic, 2020.07.30].
I thought Kristi Noem said she was reading all the science. I feel like I’ve read more science this morning than she’s read all month.
By all means, wash your hands. But to really fight coronavirus, which spreads mostly in the air, put on your mask and open the windows.
I have taught for 32. years. I have never been assigned a room with windows.
Sadly my wife’s classroom has no windows. Masks should be required.
If only the window in Kristi’s mind was as open as you want school windows. Ignorance has a cure…it is called knowledge. Well, maybe she does read all the science but she must have more than one window open and the breeze just flows through. She must have teflon for a brain because nothing ever sticks.
My classroom in Madison was an interior room with no windows.
My classroom in the new building in Montrose had a window by my desk; I can’t remember if it opened.
My classroom in Spearfish had a window in the back corner, but not the kind that provides great airflow.
I’m not sure one can open windows in Aberdeen Central.
And how many teachers are told to teach with their doors closed for “security”?
We need to seriously rethink the design of our school buildings for student health and fresh air.
I agree Cory that we should think about redesigning our schools. But as you know that costs a lot of money and the buildings in our school district are fairley new. We have 100 years to redesign
She hasn’t read science. She couldn’t understand it anyway. She reads rightwing nutjobs’s FB posts which refer her to any rightwing “studies” or opinions.
RT, I sure liked the teflon comment.
I agree that meeting outdoors whenever possible is the best choice.
I’m still seeing the occasional masked person with their nose uncovered. I know that the nose should be covered too, but it seems to me that they are less likely to spread infection from the nose than from the mouth. On the other hand, I believe they are just as likely to become infected via inhalations.
Does anyone know?