https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/02/six-foot-rule-covid-no-science/
It happened due to the fear mongering in the news. If a virus could live that long for contact spreading the transmission rate would have been so high that everyone in the world would have contracted the virus in short order.
People definitely did it longer than just in the beginning as well.
It was silly.
I figured Fauci’s quote was what you’d point to. What Fauci said is that he doesn’t remember a discussion as to whether it specifically should be 5 feet vs 6 feet or whatever, and he called the decision to institute that “empiric”—in other words, they changed the social distancing guideline and increased it to 6 feet because of empirical
evidence of smaller distances not working.
And I assume he meant not working during earlier pandemics—I just realized I said up above the guideline came about during Ebola when I meant to say SARS then H1N1, I added an edit to my post—and I think he does a disservice by saying it’s merely empiric, as there was actual data that it was based on.
I’ve addressed this previously, with sourced links to previous CDC manuals
which include citations containing the data:
Because these guidelines have existed and been advised for a long time prior to COVID. Here in the
2007 CDC Guide, on p.18 under the section
I.B.3.b Droplet Transmission, it notes that
“…investigations during the global SARS outbreaks of 2003 suggest that droplets from patients…could reach persons 6 feet or more from their source.”
It goes on to note that,
“…the distance droplets travel depends on the velocity and mechanism by which respiratory droplets are propelled from the source, the density of respiratory secretions, environmental factors such as temperature and humidity, and the ability of the pathogen to maintain infectivity over that distance.”
Because of all this,
“it may be prudent to don a mask within 6 to 10 feet of the patient.”
This guideline was updated to a
minimum of 6 feet by the CDC during the
2009 H1N1 outbreak.
It wasn’t made up during COVID, it wasn’t made up by Fauci—and it wasn’t made up without scientific basis, which is easily easily apparent from the manual’s 50-ish pages of references with hundreds of citations
As for quarantining mail and such, I disagree that this was done in a significant, widespread way beyond the beginning of the pandemic.
Here is an article from late March 2020 in which it’s noted that data exists showing that disinfecting mail and packages was unnecessary.
Here is another article noting that the CDC didn’t recommend this as necessary for mail and packages.
I suppose once that data was peer reviewed and accepted, someone continuing to do it would be illogical (assuming they were aware of the data), but I don’t really recall that being a thing beyond the first couple of months of the pandemic.
Now, I do recall schools and libraries either instituting a short quarantine on books, or using sterilizers, due to the fact that books or supplies may need to be used before the 24 hour-ish window that COVID survived on services, but that’s a bit of a different scenario.
