Beijing officials have just added an important new wrinkle to government explanations for the sudden resurgence of Covid-19 in the capital.
According to a China Daily article published June 25, the city’s health commission blames a public toilet for part of the contamination responsible for the spike in local infection cases (300 and rising) since mid-June.
Until recently, most official statements have linked this outbreak to tainted salmon imported from Norway and a Beijing fish market which sold it. It is a politically convenient narrative with a built-in foreign scape-fish, as it were.
But China Daily says government researchers have identified two newly infected Beijing residents with no recent exposure to the salmon market. Based on trace evidence, they seem to have picked up the virus from a public toilet at a smaller food mart 19 miles away.
“Two people infected with Covid-19,” the newspaper reports, “have no recent contact history with the market, but instead contracted the virus using a public toilet.” The couple reportedly visited the toilet on four separate occasions.
A trace diagram published with the story suggests that a vendor from the larger market may have passed the infection to a second or third vendor who then visited the smaller mart and left Covid-19 in its public restroom.
The article bears impressive witness to the tracing regime implemented by Chinese health officials.
Some western China-watchers remain skeptical of the salmon story and suspect it was contrived by the government to distract from the possibility that the massive party conference held in Beijing a month ago to extol Xi Jinping’s leadership was the principal infection source.
But if so, why would Xi allow state-controlled media to muddy the picture by mentioning the toilet?
One possible explanation is that he and his cronies are truly shocked by the emerging spreader potential of ubiquitous public toilets.
Even before the China Daily story, toilet infectivity was becoming a hot topic among China’s epidemiologists.
On June 16 physicist Ji-Xing Wang and fellow researchers from Yangzhou University published a study, based on computer simulations, which showed how the act of flushing a toilet can propel a plume of droplets three feet into the air, where it can hover for more than a minute before drifting onto nearby surfaces. If granulated fecal matter containing Covid-19 piggybacks the plume, the result is a veritable storm cloud of infection to be inhaled or ingested by the next passer-by.
“Flushing will lift the virus up from the toilet bowl,” Dr. Wang told the press, “and cause cross-infection among people.”
In 2003 Chinese germ-chasers came up with persuasive evidence that crappers and crap itself are viral carriers. Tracking the original SARs virus, they found that 300 residents of an apartment complex in Hong Kong had been infected through exposure to emanations from faulty plumbing.
Earlier this year, after being caught out for concealing the original Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan City, Chinese researchers began looking into possible vectors beyond bats and wet markets. At the top of their list were public toilets and communal hospital restrooms.
In February and March virologists at Wuhan university examined two hospitals overflowing with Covid-19 cases and, according to their published report, found that “patient toilets, which were not ventilated, had elevated concentrations of airborne viral RNA [genetic material].” They urged that “attention to be placed on the proper ventilation and sterilization of toilets.”
Wang’s more recent study strengthened the case for such alarms. But Wang acknowledged publicly that apart from the genetic markers lifted from the hospital toilets in Wuhan there was scant “real-world proof” that Covid-19 can be transmitted through public commodes.
Then came the findings reflected in China Daily story. The specter of two poor souls being felled by a contaminated public toilet hiked the threat estimate.
No wonder Xi considered the findings worth publicizing.
American media have begun picking up on the Chinese research. Several weeks ago, I took a swing at it and posted “Pandemic Versus Potty Imperatives” on various outlets, including my own website, franksneppexclusives.com. The number of “likes” was impressive: The standard response was: Who knew?
The common thread running through this coverage, including my own, is that public restrooms represent a major flaw in all “reopening” scenarios. Anyone who brings Covid-19 into such a facility can leave viral residue for anyone who comes after, whether or not the two parties wear masks or practice social distancing in the outside environment.
Nor is the threat short-lived. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the virus can linger for more than three days on hard plastic or metal surfaces like those in a public restroom.
A lidded toilet won’t save you, either, even if you can find one in a communal lavatory. The splash that remains on the underside of the lid or on the toilet seat itself may be poison to the touch.
Until science and technology figure out how to banish Covid-19 from public restrooms, any attempted “return to normal” is grossly premature, and the Live Free or Die Crowd may wind up very dead indeed.
The same cautionaries apply to schools and universities that attempt to resume on-campus instruction before installing restrooms that can decontaminate themselves. Any student who uses a lesser facility is effectively walking into a minefield.
The Chinese compromised us all by not coming clean at once about the initial Wuhan outbreak. But their now persistent warnings about the threat arising from Covid-rife public toilets can help keep us alive if we are not too “Trumpified” to heed them.