In a teleconference the other day I joined a bunch of fellow anti-Trumpers in discussing ways to push back against the “Live Free or Die” crowd. Many who came up on-line with me are Bernie-style idealists who believe that high-flown logic and precise death statistics can persuade non-believers to adopt saner approaches to the pandemic.
There are, to be sure, good granular arguments to be made against the no-maskers and their ilk– solid fact-based objections to loosening up the lock-down and social distancing guidelines too early.
They include: the continued scarcity of easily accessible CV testing, the uncertainty over whether previous infection confers long lasting immunity or any real immunity at all, the lack of anything resembling a vaccine or a sure-fire interim treatment for Covid-19 cases.
But these grim facts of life (and death), unassailable as they are, often elude Americans bent out of shape because of the deprivations imposed by social distancing. They are too rarefied and abstract to have much impact on the gutter-level lies peddled by Trump and gun-toting MAGA mobs who would risk their own lives and everybody else’s simply for the pleasure of getting back onto the bar-stools of their favorite neighborhood pubs.
I suggested to my teleconferencing pals that if you are going to reach the inner id of such folks and stir-crazy Americans everywhere, you’ve got the get down to where they live. You’ve got to make your case for continued caution and prudent public policy in terms that are visceral and universally accessible.
In short, you’ve got to talk about toilets.
More precisely, you’ve got to make everybody aware of the impossibility of sanitizing public restrooms to a point where they are indisputably, incontrovertibly Covid-free and incapable of infecting anybody who throws off social distancing, ventures out, masks off and gloveless, into newly opened public spaces – and then experiences the very human need to take a leak or something else.
My suggestion went down like a burp in a bathysphere. There was an uneasy silence up and down the Zoom circuit. No one felt comfortable dumping such an icky argument into polite discourse about the pandemic and how to contain it.
The Chinese are not so squeamish. In February and March clinicians in Wuhan ran floor to ceiling tests in shared toilets at CV-wards and discovered them to be potential minefields of contagion. Their findings, published recently in Nature magazine, urged increased attention to “the proper ventilation and sterilization” of such communal restrooms.
Additional research conducted elsewhere, much of it accessible on Google, has determined that the aerosol plumes – the spray unleashed by flushed toilets – can send Covid-laden droplets into the air to linger for hours, or splash them onto nearby surfaces, including wash basins and toilet seats themselves, to wait like hidden assassins for the next unwary user.
Truth is, it has long been known that human effluents (poop to you, my friends) are natural vectors for any manner of contagion. This is more so for Covid-19 because of its special virulence.
The few journalists and opinion-makers who have braved the gross factor and written candidly about the emerging potty threat from Covid-19 often qualify their warnings by noting that closing a toilet lid can help mitigate the danger.
But when was the last time you saw a toilet lid in a public restroom? And how do you close a lid, if there is one, without exposing your hand or the toe of your shoe to contamination?
And where can you find a wash basin in the infinite splash zone of a public restroom that is positively free of air-borne CV-19-laden droplets? I wouldn’t want to bet my life on the odds.
The Washington Post has just published an article that brings the potty threat (finally) to the forefront of the anti-lock-down, Live Free or Die debate. It’s headlined: “The Need To Go is A big Barrier To Going out. Why Public Bathrooms Are A Stumbling Block For Reopening.”
As can be guessed from the headline, the article focuses on concern among health officials over how to accommodate the imperatives of bowel and bladder to public safety requirements as states allow more of us to inch back towards the old normal.
In fact, it can’t be done in any meaningful way until somebody figures out how to reconfigure public restrooms to make them absolutely, positively contamination-free.
And don’t even get me started on the subject of school toilets. My daughter’s high school has 6,000 students. Even if LAUSD authorities stagger attendance next semester to allow only half that number to attend on-campus classes every other day, there is no way they can assure the few (now unisex) bathrooms are banished of the coronavirus.
No way.
So next time some Trumpster tells you it’s time to let the good times roll, ask him or her to duck into the nearest public privy and put conviction on the line by exposing bare skin to a flushing toilet and the resulting spritz. And remind your friend that every one of those droplets, however minuscule, could be the one that kills you.