Oh.
I suddenly get it.
They *don't know* that they're avoiding diseases spread by water, blood, food, faeces, because society is set up to do most of that work for them *without them knowing*.
Most people move through life inside a cocoon of invisible infrastructure that quietly blocks whole categories of disease transmission.
So they don't *try* to avoid those modes of transmission, they just do the only thing they're told to:
Wash hands.
Because:
Clean water just appears from taps.
Sewage disappears without thought.
Food is inspected, regulated, refrigerated.
Blood products are screened to a standard unimaginable in the 1980s.
Cooling towers, pools, air systems, kitchens… all have rules, filters, treatments.
So people assume hand contact is the only real mechanism left... because it's the *only one they're ever warned about*.
They don't realise that the absence of waterborne, foodborne, vectorborne, bloodborne, faecal-oral outbreaks is *manufactured*.
It's the artefact of decades of ingenuity, engineering, law, inspection and regulation.
Sometimes even the people who maintain the systems don't even know why they're doing it.
Airborne transmission is the one major route where society hasn’t built the same invisible protective scaffolding.
No compulsory ventilation standards.
Routine air filtration is rare.
No fresh-air quotas.
Very few CO₂ monitors.
No pressure to fix stale air in classrooms or crowded offices.
So people think airborne spread must be trivial or rare… because if it were real, then someone would be doing something about it.
They think "if airborne transmission mattered, surely the buildings would be designed for it" or "surely someone would have fixed that by now".
But they haven’t.
No one has.
Which is why airborne diseases tear through populations while public health officials with contact obsession insist it's all about hand hygiene.
So yes, the one route society didn't engineer away is the one route everyone is programmed to chronically underestimate.
And the horrific thing is that we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
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