In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt like the virus was everywhere — and on everything.
Some people washed their mail or wore gloves to the grocery store, while policymakers cordoned off playgrounds and encouraged businesses to scrub every surface.
But as the months passed, scientific consensus began to crystallize, suggesting some of those precautions might be missing the bigger picture of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmits.
The main way people get infected, most leading public health officials and scientists now agree, is through exposure to this virus through the air, not through contaminated surfaces known scientifically as “fomites.”
Yet
