Day: December 13, 2020

We are over cleaning in response to the virus

~ FmH

Opinion: Airborne transmission, not surfaces, is the covid-19 threat

Joseph G. Allen is an associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Charles Haas is a professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University. Linsey C. Marr is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. Writing in The Washington Post:
‘We don’t have a single documented case of covid-19 transmission from surfaces. Not one.
So why, then, are we spending a small fortune to deep clean our offices, schools, subways and buses?
Business leaders, school districts and government officials often ask us whether people are over-cleaning in response to the pandemic. The short answer is yes. The reality is that the novel coronavirus spreads mainly through the air. Especially with regular hand-washing, there’s no need to constantly disinfect surfaces.
The best analogy we’ve used for how this virus is spread is to think about a smoker… How much could you protect yourself from that smoke by scrubbing down countertops, doorknobs and all the other surfaces in the room? Not much. Shared air is the problem, not shared surfaces….’

 

Exactly. Except for one thing — the compulsive cleaning helps in treating the substantial psychological impact of the pandemic, binding our anxiety. 

Opinion: What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump

~ FmH

‘President Donald Trump has made grievance a primary feature of his life and presidency, from the thousands of lawsuits he has filed to, most recently, his repeated claims of national election fraud. His opponents, and even many of his supporters, have wondered why he can’t seem to control his urges to lash out at perceived enemies.

I am a violence researcher and study the role of grievances and retaliation in violent crime. Recently, I’ve been researching the way grievances affect the brain, and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics….’

— James Kimmel Jr, lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, writing in POLITICO.