Hand Washing
The fragility of modern life was underscored this week. The spread of the novel coronavirus has been rapid. This weekend the death toll passed 300, with the first person outside of China dying of the disease. Authorities are reassuring people that there is no immediate risk to public health in the US. The New York Times reported “While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.”
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) gave a sober picture of what we are facing. They explained, “This is a very serious public health situation, and CDC and the Federal Government has and will continue to take aggressive action to protect the public.” As of January 31, they reported:
Every day this week China has reported additional cases. Today’s numbers are a 26% increase since yesterday. Over the course of the last week, there have been nearly 7,000 new cases reported. This tells us the virus is continuing to spread rapidly throughout China. The reported deaths have continued to rise as well, and additional locations outside China have continued to report cases. There has been an increasing number of reports of person-to-person spread. And now most recently, a report from the new England journal of medicine of asymptomatic spread. While we still don’t have the full picture and we can’t predict how this situation will play out in the U.S., the current situation, the current scenario is a cause for concern.
This concern led to the first quarantine of over 50 years affecting people who are traveling from Wuhan to the US. “While we understand this action may seem drastic, our goal today, tomorrow, and always continues to be the safety of the American public.”
The primary tool to employ against this virus is good old fashioned hand washing. In exploring the global spread of the virus, The Times explained, “To avoid any viral illness, experts advise washing your hands frequently and avoiding your office or school when you’re sick.”
Earlier in the week, Elizabeth Rosenthal who worked as an emergency room physician and New York Times Correspondent during the SARS outbreak in China in 2002 and 2003, wrote about how she and her children got through that crisis with minimal disruption to their daily lives. She explained, “My main takeaways from that experience for ordinary people on the ground: 1) Wash your hands frequently. 2) Don’t go to the office when you are sick. Don’t send your kids to school or day care when they are ill, either.”
Her children attended public school every day during the outbreak. She reported, “The teacher led the kids in frequent hand washing throughout the day at classroom sinks, while singing a prolonged “hand washing song” to ensure they did more than a cursory pass under the faucet with water only.
As a result of this emphasis on hand washing she “observed something of a public health miracle: Not only did no child get SARS, but it seemed no student was sick with anything at all for months on end. No stomach bugs. No common colds. Attendance was more or less perfect.”
Rosenthal concludes, “The best first-line defenses against SARS or the new coronavirus or most any virus at all are the ones that Grandma and common sense taught us, after all.”
And along with Grandma and common sense, the number one strategy advocated by the Center for Disease Control, is hand washing.
The harsh reality in Detroit is that far too many people cannot engage in this simple strategy. They cannot wash their hands. They are victims of an inhuman system of water shut-offs that puts them and everyone else at risk.
If Mayor Duggan cannot be swayed by concern for basic human rights, compassion for children or human decency, perhaps he will notice that he is intentionally fostering circumstances that violate our most common understandings of what we all need to do. This week is another reminder of why we need to stop all water shut-offs and ensure that everyone in our city has access to clean, safe water. We need a water affordability plan now.