Totally hear you — OCD makes the ‘what if I touched something?’ alarm go off at max volume.
But here’s the thing most people don’t want to accept:
We already have the equivalent of the study you’re asking for… it’s just written across 6 years of global epidemiology, physics, and basic biology.
If handwashing mattered more than breathing shared air, the pandemic would’ve ended in March 2020.
Soap would’ve been the miracle cure.
We wouldn’t have seen superspreading in choir practice, gyms, buses, classrooms, offices, airplanes, restaurants…
We’d see it in bathrooms and kitchens instead.
But we didn’t.
Because it’s airborne.
Fomites are the background noise.
Air is the lead singer.
And honestly?
If my life depended on avoiding infection for one hour in public, I’d pick:
P100 on my face > washing my hands 100 times.
Every. Single. Time.
Not because handwashing is useless — it’s great for norovirus, HFMD, food poisoning —
but SARS-2 is a breath-based pathogen.
You’d have to be Buddy the Elf licking an entire escalator railing to match the viral dose you get from 2–3 minutes of shared indoor air.
So no, you’re not crazy for wanting clarity.
What’s crazy is that public health STILL pretends the air isn’t the highway and hands are somehow the interstate detour.
It’s airborne.
It’s always been airborne.
And the sooner we admit that, the sooner people with OCD stop being misled into fighting the wrong enemy.
But here’s the thing most people don’t want to accept:
We already have the equivalent of the study you’re asking for… it’s just written across 6 years of global epidemiology, physics, and basic biology.
If handwashing mattered more than breathing shared air, the pandemic would’ve ended in March 2020.
Soap would’ve been the miracle cure.
We wouldn’t have seen superspreading in choir practice, gyms, buses, classrooms, offices, airplanes, restaurants…
We’d see it in bathrooms and kitchens instead.
But we didn’t.
Because it’s airborne.
Fomites are the background noise.
Air is the lead singer.
And honestly?
If my life depended on avoiding infection for one hour in public, I’d pick:
P100 on my face > washing my hands 100 times.
Every. Single. Time.
Not because handwashing is useless — it’s great for norovirus, HFMD, food poisoning —
but SARS-2 is a breath-based pathogen.
You’d have to be Buddy the Elf licking an entire escalator railing to match the viral dose you get from 2–3 minutes of shared indoor air.
So no, you’re not crazy for wanting clarity.
What’s crazy is that public health STILL pretends the air isn’t the highway and hands are somehow the interstate detour.
It’s airborne.
It’s always been airborne.
And the sooner we admit that, the sooner people with OCD stop being misled into fighting the wrong enemy.
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