How to tell if your ventilation is OK By Tom Avril The Philadelphia Inquirer PHILADELPHIA — Once an hour, sometimes more, employees at Weavers Way Co-op grocery stores diligently wipe disinfectant on all “high-touch” surfaces: the checkout counters, the banisters, the plastic nozzles that dispense gourmet granola. At Whole Foods Market, workers sanitize even more often, wiping the credit-card readers between every customer. “Deep cleaning” is the coronavirus catchphrase of the moment as more retailers, schools, and offices increase their indoor operations. And in at least one case, the goal seems to be deep and long-lasting: Witness American Airlines’ plan to use a cleaning spray that is said to keep surfaces virus-free for seven days. There is nothing wrong with good hygiene, and for goodness’ sake keep washing your hands, especially as COVID-19 is joined in the coming 16
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months by the flu. But as more indoor spaces prepare to reopen this fall, infectious-disease experts say we don’t need to be quite so fanatical about cleaning surfaces — at least not to the extent that it distracts from the main route of transmitting the coronavirus: through the air. That means continuing to stick with methods that work. Wear masks. Practice social distancing — an effective safeguard against larger virusladen droplets that fall to the ground within a few feet. And when going indoors — given that smaller viral particles can remain aloft — consider the ventilation. At the Weavers Way location in Mount Airy, for example, it may help that the red-brick-and-stucco structure, built in 1925, still has some of its drafty original windows, said facilities manager Steve Hebden. “We can smell on the second floor when a neighbor has some good barbecue going,” he said. The science of air flow is complex —
more below on how to tell if an indoor space is adequately ventilated. But first, a reminder that it can be hard to tell how an individual person was infected with the virus. Despite evidence that the virus can live on surfaces for days, there are few, if any, confirmed reports of people getting COVID-19 from touching a germy object, said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. One patient in Germany may have picked up the virus from touching a salt shaker, for example, and then presumably rubbing his eyes or nose. But other than that report, in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, there is little else in the medical literature. That doesn’t mean surface transmission of COVID-19 can’t happen. It almost certainly does, given our knowledge of other viruses, said Gregory A. Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic. But short of a controlled laboratory experiment in which scientists expose
