text: One of the most frightening things about SARS-CoV-2 is its often puzzling stealth. The virus's predecessor is more like a blustery relative, loudly announcing itself—a characteristic that, in many ways, provided the strategy for its defeat. SARS-CoV was, and remains, deadly and highly contagious, traits it shares with the virus that causes COVID-19. Unlike its fellow coronavirus, however, SARS-CoV by and large makes people obviously very sick. It's also only contagious when a person has symptoms. The virus weasels its way into a victim's lungs and triggers horrible coughing, thus rowdily launching itself out of said person's mucus-ways and onto the next victim. The resulting droplets are relatively heavy and do not travel far. During the height of the SARS outbreak, all of this made it easy to identify when a person was infectious and, in turn, easy to isolate them, then contact potential next victims and isolate them too. Little of that is true for SARS-CoV-2. During the first wave, it was still unclear how easily pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people could transmit the virus. It was also unclear just how many of those people existed. But what was clear was that they did exist. As some people died startling, sudden deaths after becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, others went on living, feeling no different at all.
  
  After half a year of research, scientists were still recording wildly different answers on the prevalence of asymptomatic cases. The WHO reported that the share of true asymptomatic cases ranged anywhere from 6 to 41 per cent. The huge variance can partly be blamed on another difference in the virus's transmission and presentation: pre-symptomatic carriers who display no symptoms but who will go on to. This population can also spread the virus, walking around for days and feeling fine as it invades their body and sends out minuscule scouts. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that 40 per cent of SARS-CoV-2 transmission has happened before people even feel ill. In other words, when it comes to the virus, the traditional wisdom about disease spread and control no longer applies. It has seemed to evade patterns just as easily as it does detection. It lodges high levels of particles in the nose and mouth, making it particularly easy for the replicating viral soldiers to escape into the environment—a process called viral shedding. The simplest way for the virus to do this is when a person coughs or sneezes, but studies have also shown the virus can shed when a person talks, shouts, or sings. What's less certain is how long the virus can survive suspended in air or on surfaces (creating what's called a fomite). When it comes to the latter, research during the first wave showed the virus can survive for hours or days, depending on both the environment and the material of the surface or object.
  
  "There are so many unknowns," confessed Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead for coronavirus response and head of its emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, in June. And in the absence of a scientific answer on where the virus skulked, or just how dangerous it could be to find it, another answer emerged: clean everything. By spring 2020, we were all experts in handwashing, dutifully singing the entirety of "Happy Birthday" as we scrubbed between our raw, cracked fingers. We plowed through Lysol wipes and sloshed bleach on everything. We zealously washed our groceries, the bottoms of our shoes, our jackets, takeout containers, plastic bags, our dogs. News stories emerged of third-party sellers charging $184.99 for bottles of hand sanitizer on Amazon.ca and $40 for bottles of travel-sized Purell on eBay. Even brick-and-mortar stores upped their prices to cover costs after shortages forced them to seek out new, more expensive suppliers. The astronomical inflation didn't stop shoppers from stocking up; whole shelves went empty as people became desperate to acquire what scant protection they could. In hospital settings, where sick patients were already vulnerable to infection, janitorial and housekeeping work took on new weight. Doctors and nurses could follow distancing protocol and blue-green-red lines on the floor, but the deeper, daily work of keeping everyone safe fell to lower-paid cleaners.
  
  Precy Miguel has been employed as a housekeeper at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver since 2006. By 2020, she'd been working in the emergency department for two years. When COVID-19 patients arrived at her hospital, she was scared, just like everybody else. She'd see patients intubated in their rooms and know that, at some point, she'd have to enter that same room to clean it. She tried to fill her heart with positivity and optimism. We can fight this, she'd tell herself, donning her N95 mask, face shield, goggles, and gown. We can do it. She was skilled and she had the gear and there was no way she could get infected if she followed proper protocols. She willed herself to believe it every time she read a sign on a patient's door telling her how sick they were, how high her risk was, what she had to put on before heading in, everything she had to spray and wipe and mop. All around the world, people were dying and if she really loved her neighbours—and she did—then she had to clean the rooms where the virus waited. "We have to clean," she told me. "We have to sanitize so that we can get rid of this crisis." The thought of saving just one person kept her going through the fear.
  
  In March and April, both extra duties and staffing shortages meant Miguel would often have to work a double shift—her seven and a quarter hours stretching to nearly fifteen. Sometimes, she worked every day of the week, reminding herself that she was doing what needed to be done. Certain days were tougher than others. Miguel lives with her elderly parents and two brothers, and has been sleeping in the living room during the pandemic, behind a partition, to add extra distance. Her mother is unwell and during the pandemic was admitted to Miguel's hospital for more than a week, luckily not with COVID-19. Nurses let Miguel visit once, but she mostly stuck to phoning her mom, following the hospital's safety measures. Her mother worried that nobody visited her, wondered why she was alone in her hospital room, cut off from the comfort of family. Miguel tried to explain that it was for her own good, but was relieved when her mother was released. She remained meticulous about her cleaning routine. After every shift, she put her uniform in a plastic bag and changed into fresh scrubs. Once through the doors of her building, she sanitized everything in her path, as well as herself. Sometimes, after working a double shift, she'd be too exhausted to begin her next cleaning ritual and would spend the night sleeping in her car. She'd seen the patients in the COVID-19 rooms and didn't want anybody in her family to end up like that, silent and unconscious as she killed the virus around them.
  
  Miguel is also the chair of her union local, and spent much of her time in that role adopting a brave face and fielding others' concerns. Between focusing on her work duties, her family, and her co-workers, she barely had time to think about how she herself was faring during the pandemic. Her brothers are also essential workers, and Miguel insisted on not deviating from her usual grocery-shopping routine for the family. She also takes care of the building in which they live, and spent hours cleaning the railings, doorknobs, everything—you might as well add the tenants to her list of responsibilities. Her mind circled around those she cared for and about, looping the questions, What else can I do for them? What more is there? How can I still help? Often, she'd add another lap to her concerns by worrying about her family back home in the Philippines. The more scraped thin her energy became, the more she reminded herself: If nobody will clean the hospital, how can we save those people? Yes, she needed her paycheque, but that wasn't why she stayed. She stayed because she knew she had an important role to play in controlling the pandemic. It was her job to stop it from getting anyone else sick. Once it was in the body, well, then it was already beyond her control.