Bedbugs have no correlation with filth. They're not flies or cockroaches, they don't live off your waste. They live off you.

All it takes to start a bedbug infestation is for a female bedbug to crawl on someone, in their clothes or bag, and then fall off in a new place and start laying eggs. It can happen in the cleanest spaces in the world. They're highly resistant to insecticides and they hide in cracks barely wide enough to slide a strip of paper, so even a thorough washing and vacuuming won't remove them.

Public bus, air plane seats, delivery packages, hotel rooms, even your office chairs. You will be surprised how common they are and how easily you could get them. Often there is only one thing standing between you and them- Luck. One wrong move and it could be over.

Everything has an ecosystem living on it. Are you sure your laptop is any cleaner than the toilet seat? How long has it been since you disinfected its surface with alcohol, bleach, or citric acid?

The toilet always gets brought up in these conversations. For example, the toilet in almost every restaurant is substantially cleaner than any surface you eat on. It's made of ceramic and doused in bleach (and other cleaners) on a regular basis, so it comes as no surprise that it is cleaner.

Comparing to the toilet is a fallacy because of this and the fact that no one I know defecates on their laptop.

The toilet is actually a very good example that illustrates the importance of easily cleanable surfaces. It doesn't matter if you poop on it every day as long as it can be doused in bleach from time to time! Can't say the same for a MacBook Pro. (By the way, one usually poops in the toilet bowl, not on the toilet seat...)

We won't get cleaner buses by magically wishing all the passengers to have better hygiene. The answer is to cover all internal surfaces with non-porous, corrosion-resistant, easily cleanable materials and to eliminate nooks and crannies where dirt can accumulate. Ideally, you should be able to hose down all the seats of a bus after a day's service.

> We won't get cleaner buses by magically wishing all the passengers to have better hygiene.

Isn't wearing different clothes indoor and outdoor the actual solution? We can't expect public spaces leave alone the public transport to be sterile or sparkling clean even in paragons of hygiene such as Singapore. Getting changed into something that one wears at home and at home only and putting outdoor clothes away seems like a simple thing to do and eradicates a whole class of hygiene related issues.

Yes but also stop using plastic bevause it requires oil extraction which causes climate change that will doom us all within a generation or three, and also don't use metal because that feeds the military industrial complex and/or supports child labor or slavery or other exploitative conditions.

This would make each bus cost tens of millions of dollars.

Actually seamless welding and assembly, for large objects like busses, is only used by very high end manufacturing like rockets.

Making buses salons washable doesn't cost millions. Maybe seamless assembly is expensive, but you don't need it. Steam washable is enough.

Yep, washable vehicles are perfectly feasible. All police cars in my city have washable rear seats and a drain hole on the floor. If whoever they detain in the rear seat contaminates it with blood, vomit or covid-laden drivel, they can just hose down the whole area.

Bedbugs can hide out in tiny cracks for several days.

I doubt they can survive high temp cleaning when hiding in metal (=heat conducting) seam

thermal expansion would also be an issue I think.

It’s cleaner on average. But boy is it extremely variable whereas my table is dirtier on average but never has spikes drastically worse than average. Not to mention people eat off plates, not off the table itself directly.