Only 50% wash clothes in cold water? COVID & Laundry - Malcolm Gladwell

[underpants]

Last edited Sat Oct 30, 2021, 08:14 AM - Edit history (1)

What Can Our Laundry Choices Teach Us About Vaccine Hesitancy?

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A couple of thoughts. First: What do you suppose COVID vaccination rates (currently less than 70 percent in the U.S.) and cold-water laundry use (currently less than 50 percent of laundry loads) will be 10 years from now? I think by 2031, we’ll be close to 100 percent in both cases.


What that P&G marketer was telling me years ago was that they were going to have to fight that indifference if they wanted to convert the world to coldwater laundry. And I would argue that fighting indifference is harder than fighting principled opposition. In the latter case, both of us—me and my principled opponent—care about the thing we disagree on. I can engage their interest with a counter-argument, because they’re already invested in the topic. In the former case, how do I even get their attention? They’ve tuned out. I wonder, in the case of COVID, whether public health types underestimate the number of Americans who just don’t worry that much about COVID. We are at this point 18 months into the pandemic, and the total number of known COVID cases in the United States is just over 37 million. That’s a lot. But that’s out of a total population of 330 million. For an overwhelming number of Americans, COVID is something that happened to someone else.

So what is our “lay” understanding of laundry? It is soap plus hot water equals clean. Over and done. To accept the scientific truth about coldwater laundry, you have to make a giant step in the “expert” direction: you have to revise your intuitive understanding with a set of facts that may or may not, at first, make intuitive sense at all.

And what about bacteria and viruses? Our intuitive notion of laundry is that hot water is necessary not just to remove stains, but also to kill harmful microorganisms. Is that true? Generally, it isn’t. What the experts will tell you is that the hottest water in an American washing machine isn’t hot enough to kill most of the viruses and bacteria that travel on surfaces and fabrics. (You need industrial-grade laundry machines for that—or about 30 minutes in a hot dryer.) And for respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which travels much less effectively on surfaces, cold water and detergent does the job. On the question of germ safety, hot water is no better than cold. (It is, as they say, a wash.)