Hygiene theater

Here we have another direct consequence of there being no national good faith strategy to contain the virus and support people in the process.  Every state, every municipality, every school system, every individual business is left to figure the entire thing out for itself. And within that, is a chaos of fifty million isolated power relationships between owners and workers that drives the decision-making in a decidedly unsafe, or at least insincere, direction.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

But what if this is all just a huge waste of time?

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

There is a historical echo here. After 9/11, physical security became a national obsession, especially in airports, where the Transportation Security Administration patted down the crotches of innumerable grandmothers for possible explosives. My colleague Jim Fallows repeatedly referred to this wasteful bonanza as “security theater.”

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

A lot of this originates with institutions desperate to come up with and present evidence that they are Doing Something, even if that thing they are doing turns out to be nonsense. A nonsensical policy can have remarkable staying power even after it is discredited. And, like we said, on top of that is a host of actors with suddenly empowered to move on agendas that might have been problematic before.