I am sure duck and cover was an effective means of preventing nuclear annihilation. I don't think any Americans perished from nuclear blasts, after the duck and cover protocol was advocated.

But, no, washing your hands after touching something someone else touched is probably a good way to get rid of any pathogens they may have left on it. Those alcohol wipes and gels are probably a good second best if you can't carry a sink with hot running water around with you. And soap.

Soap makes such a mess in my pockets!

I'm not convinced this is a biological weapon. It's very virulent, meaning it is easy to transmit and catch, but it's a lot less fatal than Ebola or Warburg, and seems most harmful to the elderly, not fighting age men.

I suspect it may have been an attempt to work on vaccines,as China did run human trials of SARS vaccines, despite the animal trials revealing that was a bad idea. Wuhan Institute of Virology submitted a lot of coronaviruses to the NCBI, which means they did a lot of work with them, particularly those that remained latent in bats, because of bats' weird immune systems.

I had a plotline for a morbid syfy story in mind, in which cagy intelligence operatives crafted SARS-2 and made it available to known Chinese spies in Canada, who'd be sure to steal it, and made it so infectious that China's BSL-4 labs would be unable to contain it, given China's 10x jobsite injury rate. But I really don't want to put that story into the world today. There's enough bad mojo going around.