"too many people don't wash their hands after using the bathroom i guess they want another pandemic"

1: yeah i totally agree that's gross

2:
*leans into mic* covid is spread by breathing shared air and that's how it became a pandemic not fucking fomites you've had 6 years to internalize this what the FUCK are we doing here

and in case anyone's going to bring up hantavirus, well, idk man i'm not an expert but this guy claims to be so good luck with that https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/hantavirus-outbreak-cruise-ship/687140/

turns out one of the incredibly important things we learned from the covid pandemic is that droplet theory was absolute horses and viral airborne spread is way more common than was previously believed and i desperately need y'all to internalize that washing your hands is not going to protect your breath holes from viruses floating around in the air, PLEASE

@eniko Hygine theatre. Yelling at people to wash hands is easy, doing something about sanitizing and circulating air is also easy, but inconveniences people with money.

@xgranade it's cheap and easy, and has numerous non-viral benefits but it would take a little bit of effort and would remind everyone of covid and they'd get big sad so i guess we just won't

@eniko The next pandemic might be something different than covid?

(Also, ewww.)

@datarama well i mean the next pandemic is also still gonna be covid but we might have two at a time!

@eniko@gamedev.place wait so handwashing is more for larger pathogens like bacteria?

so viruses require like, idk, distancing, masking, not exposing others to one's own contagions, idk stuff like that, right?

and vaccination ofc!

also exercise and sleep and eat well because everyone's chronically a bit subpar health wise and i bet that this is a factor too

@wallabra @eniko There are things that are largely spread by contamination on the hands being introduced to food/the mouth, they're just largely not respiratory viruses. Norovirus is a bad time, always wash your hands especially before preparing food.

@neckspike @wallabra yes washing hands is still important, but yes air filtration whether masks or filters or even ventilation is very important because apparently loads of viruses like to just float around in the air and I'm guessing if there's another pandemic that's how it's gonna happen

@MachineLordZero yeh

@eniko ..Until RFK jr decides chlorination is sapping the USA's precious bodily fluids just like fluoridation and pasteurization. Make cholera epidemics great again!

@eniko Naturally, reporting was done by people dicking around so I was under the impression this hantavirus strain was an outlier that still didn't have potential to be as bad as COVID 🙃

Still masking anyway because fuckers forgot COVID isn't the only respiratory illness we were fucking around with.

@disorderlyf I mean the expert seems to think it's still not nearly as contagious so it's probably still ok?

@eniko @neckspike yea it turns out that going from hunting-gathering to 9-11 office work has been a bit of an epidemiological... mm... situation

@eniko @neckspike oh btw!! should we count recycling ACs as social murder?

@wallabra @neckspike I don't know enough about that

@eniko Pandemics aside, it’s disgusting to not wash your hands and then go eat a sandwich or something.

I mean, I know it’s your own shit but, still…

@eniko fortnites

@eniko @xgranade A pack of "stand here to social distance" stickers and a couple of purell dispensers was a lot cheaper than fixing the building's hvac system so guess what every capital holder picked when not forced.

@neckspike @eniko Cheaper, and also more visible, hence theatre. If we had normalized bringing aranets or similar everywhere (and subsidized to make that possible), perhaps we could have held building owners responsible for poisoning us with shitty, shitty air quality.

@neckspike @eniko Hand sanitizers are the recycling bins of public health policy.

@xgranade @neckspike @eniko Also not six years: There was pretty good circumstantial evidence for the first couple years that it was for mites (ex the infection rate plunge when Indian nurses started wearing face shields in addition to masks).

All I'm saying is if air purification was taken as seriously as fucking hand washing we'd all have a whole hell of a lot less to worry about

@eniko @neckspike I'm no HVAC expert, but I'm pretty sure it's what you call any air conditioning system that takes air from the room and just pumps it back in instead of venting it out. I think they usually require some sort of filtering.

But I doubt you can just filter viruses out of the air, they're minuscule! You'd need some weird sorta osmosis crap or something and that would just increase the energy cost (and thus ecological impact) 10x or something.

@wallabra @eniko with covid the virus itself isn't buoyant, it's floating in aerosols. While technically the viral particles can probably go through a HEPA filter, a lot of the aerosol droplets they're riding on do get caught in fine enough filter media and then it dries up and dies. In addition for building level HVAC you can install UVC sterlizers in the air handler which produces a big drop in all kinds of airborne pathogens and is in a place where nobody should be poking at it and exposing their eyes to it. Stricter standards for indoor air quality being enforced would cut all kinds of airborne disease transmission by something like 70%.

@neckspike @eniko aerosols? isn't that what eniko meant by droplet theory and it being proven unreliable or something?

@wallabra @eniko because of research on tuberculosis disease research has made a distinction between larger droplets which generally fall to the ground within a few minutes and aerosols which drift for hours. It turns out that distinction largely doesn't matter to most airborne diseases tuberculosis is an outlier.

@wallabra @eniko droplet theory wasn't even completely right for TB, it can still be infectious in aerosol form although inhaling droplets is worse.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/the-experiment-that-proved-airborne-disease-transmission

@neckspike @eniko ohh so was eniko misinterpreting the particle size distinction as the viruses literally floating in the air?

@wallabra @eniko They are floating in the air, but they're in microscopic droplets of water and attached to tiny pieces of dust. When that dust is trapped or those droplets absorbed into a filter media like a respirator mask or a HEPA filter then the viral particles are largely also trapped there.

@wallabra @eniko the confusing distinction is the idea of aerosols vs droplets, there was conjecture it was ONLY carried in infectious quantities in droplets which are larger than 5 micrometers. Aerosol and airborne mean the same thing in lay terms, it is drifting around in the air for an extended time and is infectious that way.

@neckspike @wallabra @eniko I read a fascinating article on the history and how the mistake was discovered a few years ago. https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ it looks like it’s paywalled now.

@shadows @wallabra @eniko Yeah this is the article I read a while ago. Here's an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260515193301/https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

@eniko

I just saw an episode of a TV show showing people nervously slathering on hand sanitizer after someone walks into the conference room coughing and saying, "I have COVID."

And I almost lost it.

(TV show Running Point, somewhere in season two, can't remember which episode)

@ahimsa_pdx euuuggghhh 😩

@eniko one can be shifted to individual action, the other needs institutional investment. so, it is taken very seriously, on the "we don't invest on anything that doesn't gives clear financial results" way. i'm way past mad at this point, i've internalized what "everlasting rage" feels like, and can empathize with the drive to radicalize... /sigh

so, we keep masking. and making our own spaces safer, while inching closer to conflagration.

@eniko unfortunately, mouth to mouth kissing couldn’t save us from covid 😔

@eniko I always wondered why no one protected their eyes. Bird flu taught us that it's another way for the virus to get in. We have a lot we should have learned already, but haven't.

@eniko huh but i really thought washing hands does have an effect am i that stupid
trying to search it up everything says that washing hands does help and that it can be caught through fomite i just dont understand

@oriiyon covid is not a very robust virus. it doesn't survive well or very long on many types of surfaces. you *can* (at least theoretically) catch it from touching something and then touching your face

but the primary way it spreads is through the air. washing your hands won't do anything if you're breathing in a whole bunch of virus particles anyway

@oriiyon the reason i say "at least theoretically" is that to my knowledge there's never been a proven case of fomite (touch) based covid infection, despite lots of people trying quite hard to find it

@eniko I have found this which agrees with what you said https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/104762
I believe it says that at the time of this brief (apr 5 2021) there isnt a proven case fomite transmission and that its hard to prove, and that its likely that fomite transmission would be relatively low compared to other ways to be infected
it sounds like it is possible but not something to worry much about
didnt know this

@eniko I want to add if its okay to, that idk if im reading it wrong but dont like the way you say it in your post, reads to me as calling people who believe washing your hands to be very effective at stopping covid to be stupid
what can people do when literally everyone and everywhere they say that tho? like from people we are supposed to trust

@oriiyon you're not stupid, you were lied to

@oriiyon @eniko I haven’t heard this myself outside of hygiene; there’s a reason you’re primarily told to wear masks

@eniko What's also gross is washing your hands, then sticking them under an air dryer (aka, Fecal Redistribution / Viral Concentration Unit), followed by opening the bathroom door using an inside handle.

@wallabra @eniko @neckspike

should we count recycling ACs as social murder?

That's literally how an air scrubber works. Repeated passes at some filtration efficiency until the air is adequately sanitized.

Renewing the air with new contaminated air faster than it produces adequately filtered air would defeat the purpose.

But I doubt you can just filter viruses out of the air, they're minuscule!

You can. That's literally what HEPA certification for filters is about.

And the standards for surgery-grade or cleanroom grade filters are even more stringent.

@lispi314 @neckspike @eniko That's cool :o

Does it depend on like the size of the virus and stuff?

@wallabra @neckspike @eniko To an extent. 0.3 micrometers is the size that was taken as a general measurement target for testing because it apparently sits around where a particle is worst affected by both electrostatic effects (and other very-small particle effects) that better affect smaller particles, and physical obstruction that better affects larger particles. Something like that.

So if something has a rating meaning 99.95% filtration per pass would leave relatively little in its filtered exhaust, but with a sufficient saturation of some sufficiently virulent pathogen a single pass may not be enough. Air circulation in the room also becomes very important, because air has to actually go through the filtering process to be sanitized.

(This is incidentally why rock cutting workers (when properly equipped) use rebreathers and other air-cleansing equipment instead of just N95 respirators. Enough goes through such filters that there is still a health hazard.)

There is still stuff that isn't affected enough like scent particles that get very small or gasses, but those are also not biohazards (they can be toxic or allergenic though, among other issues, but that's an entirely different kind of problem and requires a different approach for handling).