When the CDC updated guidelines this month to state that the risk of catching coronavirus from contaminated surfaces is low, it seemed to acknowledge what a lot of epidemiologists had been saying for months: All that disinfecting and wiping of surfaces was a waste of time.
But on the Bay Area’s public transportation systems, where workers have been fastidiously cleaning ticket dispensers and saturating trains with disinfectant spray as a pandemic protection measure, the extra routines that critics deride as hygiene theater are still going strong.
One key reason: With more people returning to in-person work amid California’s reopening, transit agencies are desperate to convince wary riders their systems are safe.
“We are not changing anything in terms of our cleaning protocol,” said Stacey Hendler Ross, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, where workers regularly wipe down surfaces like bus hand rails. “We feel it’s important to continue our cleaning protocol to make sure our customers are as confident and comfortable as possible on our vehicles.”
AC Transit spokesman Robert Lyles said the East Bay bus system similarly has “no plans to alter our enhanced cleaning protocols.”
All of that scrubbing hasn’t been cheap.
VTA has spent about $2.1 million on cleaning supplies since the pandemic began, Hendler Ross said, a figure that does not include labor costs.
BART spends over $500,000 each month on its COVID cleaning regimen, though changes are in the works following the CDC’s update.
And in San Francisco, where Muni workers have logged nearly 24,000 hours conducting “enhanced sanitation” of vehicles, transportation director Jeffrey Tumlin cited the expense of extra cleaning as one of the reasons the agency has not been able to more fully restore bus and light rail service it cut earlier in the pandemic.
1⃣ Disinfecting trains and stations is BART's highest priority. BART continues to use hospital-grade disinfectant in stations and on-board trains. Train poles are wiped down with disinfectant at end-of-line. Crews use electrostatic foggers in cars which spray disinfecting mist. pic.twitter.com/6RwYB3SKYW
— BART (@SFBART) May 27, 2020
Like many businesses and members of the public, transit agencies stepped up their cleaning efforts in March of 2020. Back then, frightening studies were claiming the coronavirus could live for days on surfaces, health experts were warning about the danger of touching our faces, and disinfecting wipes were flying off store shelves.
Our understanding of how the virus spreads has evolved significantly since then. We now know coronavirus is transmitted primarily from person to person, through the respiratory droplets and aerosols we expel from breathing and talking — not from our mail, groceries or bus seats.
While it is true that the virus can live on some surfaces for a period of time, the studies that fueled our obsession with cleaning were based on unrealistic laboratory conditions. The coronavirus generally doesn’t pose a threat on surfaces in the real world.
Epidemiologists now say the level of risk on public transportation mainly depends on whether riders are wearing their masks and how crowded vehicles are.
Alejandra Camacho, who commuted on VTA’s light rail every weekday before the pandemic, is feeling hesitant about getting back on board when the San Jose tech firm where she works starts bringing employees back to the office this summer. But contaminated surfaces aren’t her main worry.
“My concern is more with how many people are going to be there in a very close space, sharing air,” Camacho said.
To that end, Hendler Ross noted VTA and other transit systems limit capacity on vehicles and require riders to wear masks. Other activities people have eagerly resumed during the pandemic, like exercising or dining indoors, are believed to be much riskier than public transportation.
Still, perceptions are proving hard to change — almost two-thirds of respondents in a Bay Area Council poll released Tuesday said they believed coronavirus had made public transportation unsafe.
More proof is in transit’s still-decimated ridership. BART now sees more than 50,000 passengers per weekday, compared to over 400,000 pre-COVID; the number of cars crossing the Bay Bridge each day, on the other hand, has rebounded to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels.
While federal COVID relief packages have made up for lost fare revenues and kept systems afloat over the past year, operators now need to get riders back on board.
That puts transit agencies in a tough position: Do they stop “deep cleaning” because it’s expensive and ineffective, or do they keep it up because the smell of bleach makes riders, not to mention their own workers, feel safe?
https://twitter.com/jeffreytumlin/status/1380702077576376320
“We know that 3x daily bus sterilization is ‘COVID theater,’” Tumlin, the Muni director, wrote on Twitter last week. “Yet it’s important to our frontline staff who are traumatized showing up every day thru a pandemic. Both perception and health science matter, like with ‘safe’ streets.”
The days of extra cleaning could be numbered, though.
A Muni spokeswoman said the agency is talking with local public health officials about future cleaning practices. Dan Lieberman, a spokesman for SamTrans and Caltrain, said those agencies are not changing their protocols immediately but are working to “determine which are worth continuing and which are not.”
Workers at BART are still “fogging” trains with disinfectant spray each night, but by this summer spokeswoman Alicia Trost said their efforts will instead be focused on what she described as “more elbow grease type cleaning for a cleaner-looking system.” That means keeping restrooms tidy and getting rid of litter, graffiti and foul odors on trains — the kinds of cleanliness concerns that BART riders complained about long before COVID-19.
