CDC: We are back to our pre-Covid levels of food-related grossness.
Remember when we thought that Covid-19 mostly spread via contact with contaminated surfaces? It made sense to me. We touch everything around us and then we touch our eyes and mouth. On that basis alone, I was on board with masking fairly early on, even though I was not yet convinced that the novel coronavirus spread mostly in the air. I figured that the mask was keeping my contaminated paws out of my mouth, thereby lowering my odds of getting Covid-19.
Well, we were wrong about how the virus mostly spreads. But I’ll tell you this: during the time when we thought we needed to “fear the fomites,” our surfaces were never cleaner. Yes, things were taken to an extreme that often constituted hygiene theater. Still, all of this had a clear benefit. We knocked out droves of infectious pathogens that routinely make us either a little or very sick. I’ve enjoyed not getting colds and other illnesses.
In fact, our short-lived obsession with cleaning everything led to my favorite headline of the Covid-19 pandemic:
“This guy” who ordered a box of Clorox wipes on March 20, 2020 only to have them arrive 349 days later? Inside Medicine’s own data guru Benjy Renton.
And it wasn’t just Benjy. For a while there, hand washing, hand sanitizer use, and cleaning surfaces in general were way up. This probably did something to slow down Covid-19, but even more to stop other infections. Illnesses from pathogens most associated with contaminated food dropped dramatically in 2020. While some of this could have been due to decreased travel and testing, it clearly also reflected our new-and-improved (but apparently temporary) hygiene habits.
2020: Later, Listeria! 2022: Hella Salmonella.
According to the CDC, we’re back to pre-pandemic rates of some nasty infections, and are now above 2018 rates for some others. Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shiga-toxin producing E coli, Shigella, Yersinia, Vibrio, Listeria, Cyclospora? You don’t want them. These diseases range from not fun to dangerous or deadly, depending on the bug and the person infected. Each year, tens of thousands of US residents are hospitalized due to infections like these, and over 1,000 die.
Have these bugs bounced back because we are traveling again? Is it because we are testing like we were before? Or have we reverted to our less-than-sufficient hand hygiene habits?
My vote is that we’ve gone back to our old ways. Ask yourself: is your hand hygiene as good as it was in 2020? Are you really scrubbing under those nails?
No surprise, hand sanitizer companies were the big winners in the early pandemic economy. The makers of Purell saw 600% increases in sales and believed that we’d turned a new leaf on hygiene and that we’d never go back. They were incorrect.
Shot (2020 headline):
Chaser (2023 headline):
To sum up:
In 2020, interest in hand hygiene was so great that you couldn’t find hand sanitizer on the shelves. Now, that product’s most iconic brand is having business trouble. Meanwhile, food-borne illnesses are back to pre-pandemic levels or worse in the US. While the connection isn’t ironclad, I’d wager these are related.
Be honest. Has your hygiene regimen taken a hit since 2020-2021? Leave your comments below. Meanwhile…I gotta go wash my hands.
My hand washing has been thorough since I spent a summer working as an ER clerk in 1982 and then became a volunteer EMT for a few years
I taught my 3 children to never touch their faces and wash hands well and often before they started school
My two boys both had only 2 sick visits to the pediatrician from ages 0-18 years
I will always continue to be thorough and careful
I never washed surfaces more than I already had, never left mail sitting for more than a couple hours, and never washed groceries. But I did buy sanitizer (including some made locally by a distillery that pivoted!) and I still use it on my hands after every trip to the store, library, post office, etc. We have some in each vehicle and refill often from our large containers. And i wash my hands longer and more often than i did pre-pandemic. (Of course, we also still mask in all public indoor spaces that aren't well open to the outdoors, and, in a big change since before the pandemic began, we don't eat at restaurants except outside or, very rarely (5x in 3.5 yrs), in very spacious almost-empty indoor spaces -- so I may well be an outlier.)