In the last week, more than 20 million people have watched a video of Jeffrey VanWingen, a family medicine physician in Michigan, unpacking his groceries. He divides his countertop with a long strip of blue tape into two halves: dirty and clean. He then drenches a paper towel with Lysol and wipes down bags of chips and plastic-wrapped heads of broccoli before he transfers them over to the “clean” side. He even scrubs apples and oranges with soap.
VanWingen does this, he says in the video, because while the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented, “there is a precedent that we use in the medical field called sterile technique that can reduce risk.” But some microbiologists say that some of this advice is overkill, or even potentially harmful.
