Do you ever stop and think about the things that people do in their day-to-day lives because it's taken for granted that doing the thing will serve a certain purpose, but the reality is there's no connection between doing the thing and the intended purpose? I've thought about that a lot this year.
I recently wrote about some false beliefs that a lot of people in society hold due to their having been propagandized to hold those beliefs. This is about a different sort of false belief. False beliefs that didn't become widespread through malicious disinformation campaigns, but rather because some people thought something was true even though evidence was inconclusive or had been misinterpreted, the belief became widespread, and then when evidence emerged to show it was wrong, it was too late - the belief had already become entrenched in society.
The COVID pandemic has really been quite the object lesson here.
I strongly suspect that, years from now, if you polled people on what were the important things to do to stay safe during the pandemic, two of the top responses would be "wash your hands" and "stay at least six feet away from other people." To be clear, these are absolutely not two of the most important ways to stay safe from COVID.
Public health messaging at the start of the pandemic was based on a misunderstanding about how respiratory viruses spread. It was thought that spread happened mainly through virus-laden droplets emitted from people's respiratory tracts, droplets that would fall to the ground in short order and travel less than six feet from the infected person.
This model of transmission was based on misinterpretations of data going back many years. It had already been challenged by some scientists but it wasn't until COVID that we got a really large scale and obvious demonstration that this model was wrong. Transmission in fact occurs through aerosols (blue-green in the figure) that linger in the air and can travel much farther than six feet due to air currents.
With the droplet model (gray in the figure), if you are six feet away from an infected person, no virus will directly reach you. But droplets could end up on surfaces you might touch, so washing your hands frequently and avoiding touching your face with potentially contaminated hands would be important. Frequent sanitization of commonly touched surfaces, like everyone was going crazy about early in the pandemic, would also be important.
There have been 244 million reported COVID cases worldwide, a huge underestimate of the actual number of people who have been infected, and from what I have gathered, there has never been confirmation of COVID spreading through a contaminated surface. This doesn't prove that it's completely impossible for COVID to spread through a contaminated surface, but it does very strongly suggest that it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Frequent sanitization of surfaces to protect against COVID? It's a ritual, one that isn't actually doing anything to protect against COVID. It's also a big waste of time and resources and a distraction from effective safety measures and therefore does more harm than good when businesses and organizations promote it.
This has sunk in for a lot of people by now, although I see a depressingly large number of places still talk about how they're sanitizing surfaces to keep you safe. What seems to have sunk in less is what seems to me like the obvious next step. If COVID doesn't spread through surfaces, then washing your hands also isn't doing much of anything to protect you from COVID. (I often see people online say things like "We're still masking, distancing, and washing our hands" to show their continued commitment to pandemic safety.) I'm not saying washing your hands isn't a good idea. It is, for other reasons. But not for COVID safety. For COVID safety, it's another ritual. The ubiquitous hand sanitizer we still see everywhere? Also a ritual, and a distraction from actual effective safety measures.
How about six feet of distance? That's a little more complicated. Because virus-laden aerosols will tend to be more concentrated in the immediate vicinity of an infected person, having people be more spread out from each other rather than packed together does help reduce the chances of spread. But there's nothing special about six feet. The important factors are concentration of virus in the air and duration of exposure. Passing close by an infected person for a few seconds and then going your separate ways is not going to be as dangerous as being twenty feet away from an infected person in the same poorly ventilated room for an hour. Thinking that six feet of distance is a protective barrier is a superstition.
The aerosol model of transmission tells us that some of the most important ways to slow spread (other than vaccines, which since their widespread availability are the most important in allowing a return to normal activities) are recognition that outdoors is orders of magnitude safer than indoors, ventilation and filtration of indoor air, and use of good quality and properly worn masks indoors. A lot of people are aware of these things now, but the superstitions and rituals persist. Another one? Those plexiglass dividers that seem just as ubiquitous as hand sanitizer. Their use is also based on the droplet model and there's no evidence they protect against COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years from now, a lot of the plexiglass dividers will still be there and there will be people who won't even know why.
It strikes me that, since COVID is not going away, and other respiratory viruses also harm and kill many people, and there will be future pandemics, one of the very most important things we should be doing is a large scale effort to improve the quality of indoor air through ventilation and filtration. People want to be able to live their normal lives. Vaccines help make this a lot safer, but aren't 100% effective, and won't stop the next pandemic. Masks help enable some semblance of normal life but also aren't 100% effective, and mask wearing does have real drawbacks so we should strive to make it unnecessary. Social distancing (in the "avoid gathering with other people" sense, not the "six feet of distance" sense) definitely slows the spread but also goes against human nature and in a long-term scenario is harmful in many ways, so we should ideally get to a place where it's a last resort, not a primary pandemic control measure. To me, vaccines and improving indoor air quality are the two things that best enable safe enjoyment of normal life and should be used in tandem - improving indoor air quality could be the second most important big infrastructure program of our time (the most important is definitely tackling climate change) and could create so many jobs in addition to improving people's health and saving lives! We should do this!
But instead, so many organizations and people are sticking to the superstitions and rituals that don't do much, if anything, to protect against COVID. (And maybe, contrary to what I said at the start about these beliefs not being the product of disinformation campaigns, there is some element of bad acting here, in that organizations are incentivized to promote the easier, ineffective methods over the more difficult but actually effective steps toward improvement of indoor air quality.) It's sad, but it's also been a fascinating experience to watch in real time as these new belief structures have emerged. And it makes me wonder how many other superstitions and rituals there are that most people take for granted as serving some real function when they really don't. I'm sure there are a lot. I'm also aware that this sort of thinking, of always questioning the conventional wisdom, can be taken much too far and can lead to nonsense like the Flat Earth movement, 9/11 truthers, and most harmfully right now, anti-vaxxers. So be careful with this. But it's an interesting thing to think about! Do you have any other good examples? If you do, I wonder what their origins were.
