At my Port St. Lucie house, I close the toilet lid before flushing. I’m Deb Kowalski, and the habit makes tidy sense: put a cover between the bowl and the rest of the bathroom, then get on with your day. Here in Florida, as of mid-September 2026, I still catch myself treating that small motion as if it settles the germ question.
It does not settle the question the way I thought. The lid can stay part of my routine, but I have stopped counting it as the cleaning. Those are different jobs, even if closing the lid is by far the easier one.
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What the university researchers say
The university researchers who tested the lid habit reported: “Viral contamination of restroom surfaces did not depend on toilet lid position (up or down).” Researchers added a surrogate for human enteric viruses to household and public toilet bowls, flushed them, and checked restroom surfaces. In that experiment, closing the lid did not reduce the viral contamination they measured on those surfaces…