The public in the spring of 2020 got a lot of bad advice. Famously, then-President
Donald Trump
made weird comments that kind of sounded like he wanted to inject bleach into people. But even before that, public health authorities were telling us to disinfect our groceries, and plenty of folks did it.
I think it is just now hitting me that life is forever changed. We may never share beer nuts in a bar again. We may never shake hands upon meeting again. When my kids are grown, they may inherit wiping down the groceries and packages and they may teach their kids to do the same.
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 15, 2020
Check out this
video
by a doctor urging you to massively use disinfectant and to wash your food with soap and water. It got 26 million views and celebrity
endorsements
, and there are scary comments such as this:
I just watched the video gen washed my ham for dinner with soap and water. Going too far?!!
— Dr. Linda Tribuzio (@DrLindaTribuzio) March 28, 2020
So, yes,
it seems like people ingested cleaning products in 2020
, but we may have the COVID-crazy doctors and actresses to blame more than Trump.
In general, the news media went all in on a shock and awe of Lysol. For instance, the New York Times’s consumer health columnist
wrote a lengthy piece
in May 2020 on disinfecting everything, following
another piece in March
saying you need to wipe down your light switches and draw pulls every single day in order to battle COVID. The Washington Post ran a story in September 2020 by a woman who wrote of how she “sanitize[s] the car’s indoor and outdoor door handles, steering wheel, gear shift, and radio buttons” and washes her nostrils with soap and alcohol.
Many schools that opened to in-person learning in the 2020-2021 school year had Wednesdays as remote-only days for the sake of disinfecting the schools. The American Federation of Teachers
demanded
daily sanitizing.
Beyond the occasional ingestion of bleach by overeager grocery-watchers, overuse of disinfectants had plenty of negative effects, and the New York Times this week continued to
come to terms
with this: “Since we now know that disinfecting isn’t likely to protect us from Covid, it’s worth taking stock of whether the risks of using certain cleaning products are greater than the rewards.”
Quaternary ammonium compounds, or QACs, are a common cleaning chemical, and there is evidence linking these chemicals to all sorts of harms, possibly asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or infertility.
The pandemic triggered a mania of disinfecting and possibly increased the number of QCs floating around people’s homes.
Along with the clear and lasting costs of school closures and the terrible damage done by months of isolation, the harms of excessive disinfecting are a clear example of the errors caused by the “you can never be too safe” mindset. During the pandemic, those of us who brought up the costs and benefits of mitigation measures were attacked as grandma killers.
Let’s hope that going forward, policymakers and media tastemakers don’t listen to the folks who refuse to acknowledge trade-offs.
