If you’ve spent that past year vigorously rubbing disinfectant cloths over your food or mail, or spraying that stringent stuff over your doorknobs and tabletops to avoid contracting COVID-19, I have some bad news for you: It was a gigantic, futile waste of time.

It turns out that the coronavirus really isn’t spread by touching, say, an apple or drawer handle that was touched by someone who was infected. Ditto for the fear that virus-laden droplets would drift through the air and settle on these surfaces, just waiting for your unsuspecting fingers to come along. The bug is just not transmitted this way.

OK, technical clarification time: Yes, it is theoretically possible that you could get COVID by touching something that had the virus on its surface and then touching your mouth, but it’s highly unlikely. The CDC updated its surface cleaning guidelines and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000.

“Finally,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne viruses at Virginia Tech. “We’ve known this for a long time, and yet people are still focusing so much on surface cleaning. … There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten COVID-19 by touching a contaminated surface.”

As another microbiologist, Emanuel Goldman at Rutgers University, put it, “This is a virus you get by breathing. It’s not a virus you get by touching.”

Yikes. So if you’re feeling like a sucker, that’s understandable — but you’re being too hard on yourself. When this pandemic was starting to sweep across our country and the world, we didn’t know exactly how it was spread. Since some viruses can be transmitted by surface contact, it seemed prudent to wipe down or spray everything that you, the kids and the dog could get into. And again, it is theoretically possible that some people did contract COVID-19 from a steering wheel or cup. Not likely, mind you, but remotely possible.

Personally, I never got into the spray-and-wipe thing, and I’m a bit of a clean freak. I figured that wearing a mask out in public was good enough, and that’s probably 90% of the battle. At first I didn’t even use the sanitizer dispensers that most businesses have scattered about, but then I noticed how convenient they were.

In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if those devices were kept around when the pandemic finally ends. A splash of sanitizer on your hands can ward off other germs and it does give you a fresh feeling. One of the odd benefits of the mask-wearing, distancing and hand-washing to fight COVID is that we practically wiped out the flu this season. Doctors reported only a handful of cases in most cities, and it was clearly because the bug just couldn’t jump from person to person the way it used to.

For now, however, the obsessive-compulsive activities that became known as “hygiene theater” can be retired. In future years when movies and TV shows depict this time, we may laugh at the spraying-and-wiping types, comparing them to superstitious oldtimers who thought cats could suck the breath from babies.

But don’t laugh too hard, because that frantic character was probably you at some point in this strange experience.

Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom