Latest ‘Daily Mail’-type Covid-19 warning: virus can rise from toilets to infect you
It’s the latest Covid-19-related horror story, and it’s as daft as all the other health scare stories for which the Daily Mail was once justly infamous.
The fear is that the virus can live in people’s bodily waste, which may then be sprayed across public toilets all over the country, whenever people use the flush.
It has raised concern that people who have had the disease, and those who don’t know they’ve got it, could spread it by allowing it onto surfaces people are likely to touch in public facilities as lockdown eases and we all go back to work.
The answer is to put the lid down every time you flush, if there is one. And if there isn’t – why not? Some organisations are run by real cheapskates who deserve to have their staff go back into lockdown for want of such a simple thing.
But the real question is, if this claim is true, what else have we been absorbing into ourselves, just by using allegedly-clean public lavatories?
Flushing the toilet can create an aerosol cloud of coronavirus droplets more than a metre high which can be inhaled by others, spreading the infection, new research warns.
Physicists specialising in fluid dynamics are warning about the transmission method following studies which found coronavirus particles surviving in the faeces of the infected.
The danger that COVID-19 could be transmitted through the common use of toilets could impact how workplaces, restaurants and bars re-open as the world leaves lockdown.
I was always under the impression that lids were removed to stop people scoring coke on them
Maybe in the Houses of Parliament…
Most of the public toilets are closed anyway
They’ll open again as lockdown eases, though.
all public toilets could display notices saying “Before flushing. lower the lid” And WASH YOUR HANDS.
I always thought the reason lids were removed was to stop people lining up their coke on them.
Gill
Actually I think the reason most public loos lack lids – and often proper seats too – is because some idiots get a kick out of breaking them. But I don’t believe for a minute that 21st century technology is incapable of producing a hygienic, comfortable and vandal-proof toilet seat, so undoubtedly penny pinching is a factor.