Here's the thing. You breathe it in. The reason you also want to wash your hands and sanitize surfaces is because if someone breathes on those surfaces and you touch that residue and then touch your mucus membranes, that creates an additional, more circuitous possible pathway.

But to my knowledge, it's not, like, oozing out your pores. Even if it was, that'd still be a much less efficient way to transmit. Ultimately it still circles back to breath. As such, you can wash a surface 1,000 times but if someone breathes near it, it's back to square one.

Think about it like paint. A jar of paint, you can just not touch. It can sit there being painty, and all you need to do is not touch it and you will have no paint on you. But put a few misters in a room, and squirt them regularly, and you'll have paint everywhere.

What's a more efficient way to stop the paint? Isolate the misters. If they can't be isolated, put a shield in front of the nozzle so most of the paint hits the shield. And as a final method, clean up whatever paint still landed on surfaces.
The reverse order makes no sense.

As such, practices such as approaching someone with a bottle and saying, "Here, want some hand sanitizer?" totally baffle me. Don't approach me and spray paint in my direction while offering me the means to clean up that same paint. Stay away, and there's nothing to clean up!

Same with people who wear masks but don't do social distancing. Sure, the masks help - if the person is actually fully covering all their "nozzles." But the most effective way to not get paint on you is to stand out of the mister's reach, not to hope the nozzle coverage is solid.

This thread brought to you by my general grumpiness about way too many people getting way too close to me way too many times over recent weeks. I hate having to be so on guard, but holy shit so many people just do not get it. I've become very practiced at quickly backing away.

But it feels like playing a bizarre, slow game of tag all the time whenever I'm outside my home, where a fellow player can pop out from around any corner at any moment, and I REALLY don't want to be "it."