CORONAVIRUS: “Full-front disinfection work has started in #Wuhan, an effort to contain the spread of #coronavirus,” the People’s Daily, China, tweets. The state-run media outlet bills itself as “The largest newspaper in China,” atop a video that looks like something out of Blade Runner, with massive trucks spraying chemicals high into the air at night in Wuhan:
Of course, as Business Insider notes, it’s largely a PR exercise: China is sending trucks to spray bleach on entire cities as the country struggles to contain the Wuhan coronavirus.
Joe Drake, president and founder of the US-based Decon Seven, said he’s seen such disinfecting sprayer trucks dispatched in cities including Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan even before the current coronavirus outbreak.
But health experts say these public displays of germ-busting are probably not doing much to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, and that the disinfection should instead target specific spots, like emergency rooms, and communal surfaces in hospitals, where more coronavirus germs are likely to get swapped around.
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“The truth is that coronaviruses have really poor survivability on surfaces,” Saskia Popescu, a senior infection prevention epidemiologist who works at a Phoenix-based healthcare system, told Insider. “This is an organism that is generally spread through respiratory droplets. So that cough, that sneeze, and yes, your hands can get contaminated and then you touch your eyes, your mouth, and things like that.”
She said the widespread use of disinfectants like bleach — which is what was being used in truck sprayers in at least one Chinese city, Yichang, according to a local report — is “a little over the top.”
“I would rather see better efforts to make sure people are disinfecting emergency rooms and high-touch surfaces in hospitals and schools more than I would want to see bleach being sprayed on streets,” she said. “Honestly, think about how often do your hands or your mouth come into contact with a street?”
The bleach is not just for the streets. Patients and doctors are also being disinfected after they’re released from hospitals or finish a shift.
UPDATE: The coronavirus has killed hundreds, but is China giving us the full picture?, Glenn asks at USA Today.