Ok, I could have been clearer. Blame the long covid.

You should be wearing N95/KN94 masks whenever you are outside of that closed alone room, especially when you can’t keep a 6’ gap from others, washing your hands and using 70% ethanol hand sanitiser, and not touching all the things all the time. These are effective and backed by science. Additional measures such as blocking the gap under your door and buying air purifiers for your closed apartment where you remain alone are worthless additions to that routine.

Still debated, probably not a significant vector, but definitely possible: Lin, N., Zhang, B., Shi, R. et al. Decay pattern of SARS-CoV-2 RNA surface contamination in real residences. Sci Rep 14, 6190 (2024).

Key quote from conclusion:

The environmental contamination of object surfaces by SARS-CoV-2 RNA in residences of COVID-19 patients is low, but cross-contamination caused by water taps and washing basins may have hidden transmission risks. Generally, fomite transmission played a limited role in COVID-19 spread. Even the residence was contaminated by SARS-CoV-2, it was reduced by 90% three days after the patient left.

Edited to add: I mention it mostly because where I live is a high-traffic part of the building with people constantly using the elevators and opening doors. That’s why I’m still careful about it. If I lived in a lower density place I probably wouldn’t go as hard on the “no touchy” thing.

Through water droplets in the air, yes. It doesn’t just waft around on its own. This is why ventilation is important for close-contact venues like meeting rooms where people are speaking towards your face, but doesn’t help in closed rooms where you’re alone.

I wear a mask when I leave the apartment, and use my pinky to open doors where possible. Elevator buttons get pushed with my keys. I haven’t caught it again in 2+ years doing this. The times I caught it were from my office.

Covid is spread via water droplets and touch, so additional measures are pretty worthless beyond keeping your door shut.

References weren’t paywalled, so I assume this is the paper in question:

Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P.R., Jurafsky, D. et al. AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. Nature (2024).

Abstract

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing^1,2 to informing hiring decisions³. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans^4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement^8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.

Some provide screen-reader instructions, but most places barely remember blind people exist. It’s another example of people with disabilities being ignored and marginalised.

And then even if they do remember blind people exist, they probably forget there are people who aren’t blind who can’t do their tests for other reasons, like dyslexia or dexterity impairments.

And then you have hCaptcha who makes disabled people to sign up to their database to use their cookie.