The public in the spring of 2020 got a lot of bad advice. Famously, then-President Donald Trump made weird comments that kind of sounded like he wanted to inject bleach into people. But even before that, public health authorities were telling us to disinfect our groceries, and plenty of folks did it.

Check out this video by a doctor urging you to massively use disinfectant and to wash your food with soap and water. It got 26 million views and celebrity endorsements , and there are scary comments such as this:

So, yes, it seems like people ingested cleaning products in 2020 , but we may have the COVID-crazy doctors and actresses to blame more than Trump.

In general, the news media went all in on a shock and awe of Lysol. For instance, the New York Times's consumer health columnist wrote a lengthy piece in May 2020 on disinfecting everything, following another piece in March saying you need to wipe down your light switches and draw pulls every single day in order to battle COVID. The Washington Post ran a story in September 2020 by a woman who wrote of how she “sanitize[s] the car’s indoor and outdoor door handles, steering wheel, gear shift, and radio buttons” and washes her nostrils with soap and alcohol.

Many schools that opened to in-person learning in the 2020-2021 school year had Wednesdays as remote-only days for the sake of disinfecting the schools. The American Federation of Teachers demanded daily sanitizing.

Beyond the occasional ingestion of bleach by overeager grocery-watchers, overuse of disinfectants had plenty of negative effects, and the New York Times this week continued to come to terms with this: “Since we now know that disinfecting isn’t likely to protect us from Covid, it’s worth taking stock of whether the risks of using certain cleaning products are greater than the rewards.”

Quaternary ammonium compounds, or QACs, are a common cleaning chemical, and there is evidence linking these chemicals to all sorts of harms, possibly asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or infertility.

The pandemic triggered a mania of disinfecting and possibly increased the number of QCs floating around people’s homes.

Along with the clear and lasting costs of school closures and the terrible damage done by months of isolation, the harms of excessive disinfecting are a clear example of the errors caused by the “you can never be too safe" mindset. During the pandemic, those of us who brought up the costs and benefits of mitigation measures were attacked as grandma killers.

Let’s hope that going forward, policymakers and media tastemakers don’t listen to the folks who refuse to acknowledge trade-offs.