65: Fruit Flies When You're Having Fun

What’s the perfect number of worms? Depends. If you’re trying to create a thriving worm farm that will create rich fertilizer for your little garden, you’re going to need a non-zero number of worms. But if you’re trying to feed your cat in the shower (because…reasons), ideally “none” is the optimal value.

On this week’s episode, you’ll learn about pandemic cleaning habits that are worth keeping, why someone would feed their cat in the shower, and why digging up worms is apparently easier than keeping them happy.

Related to pandemic cleaning habits, on this episode we talk a lot about safety theater/hygiene theater and how many of the things we do aren’t actually that effective at reducing disease (or aren’t effective at reducing the disease we’re trying to attack, i.e. COVID vs. the flu). There are some really good reading materials available on that front:

This Atlantic article is kind of the main one.

At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.

Of course, this may not help with COVID, but it WILL help cut down on the cold and flu season if done correctly. That doesn’t mean constantly stopping to wipe every damn thing — but the move toward actually sanitizing, say, an airline tray even once a day is a big step!

Listen, if you’re only cleaning so Mr. Clean will come visit and grind on you, that’s between you and your god.

A few weeks back, the CDC released a science brief about hygiene theater, wherein they basically said that soap — literally just washing your hands — is probably the best prevention for COVID. That means no wiping down of groceries (seriously, stop doing that) or like, sanitizing the doorknobs that only you and your spouse touch. The excessive disinfecting for the sake of cleaning isn’t just useless, it’s also potentially harmful and/or wasteful. From their release:

…the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.

There have been increases in poisonings and injuries from unsafe use of cleaners and disinfectants since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some types of disinfection applications, particularly those including fogging or misting, are neither safe nor effective for inactivating the virus unless properly used.

Their conclusion: Wash your damn hands, wear a mask, and stop worrying so much about surface transmission because it’s not happening.

HOWEVER, and we’ll say it again — this is not a license to get gross. Cleaning actual crud off of your surfaces is good. Sanitizing your phone sometimes is smart because you touch it all the damn time. Using cleaners that have soap, not just disinfectant, is a good way to keep things from getting stinky. And yes, surfaces can still be disgusting (e.coli, the common cold, salmonella) so things like wiping down grocery carts or other highly-touched items is probably a good way to keep from getting sick.

And wash your grocery totes. If we ever want to be able to use reusable bags ever again, we’re going to need to hold up the consumer side of the bargain and not bring in that nasty canvas bag that you haven’t washed since the 1999 KUOW pledge drive.