Preventing The Spread Of SARS-CoV-2:
Now that infectious disease experts have been able to identify how SARS-CoV-2 spreads, they have also been able to formulate the tested and proven methods to prevent their spread, and thus reduce the COVID-19 cases that result from this contagion. Not surprisingly, most of these methods are basic, simple, easy, and have been proven effective long before the first Coronavirus was detected. Read on to know what you may already have been doing right, and what else you should be doing to make yourself more protected against catching the virus and suffering from COVID-19.
Frequent and Proper Hand Washing
As simple a measure as this may be, frequent and proper hand washing is a godsend when it comes to preventing the spread of viruses and bacteria, including the SARS-CoV-2. Proper handwashing is a time-tested proven effective way to prevent virus and bacteria infection and transmission. Unfortunately, there are some who do not do it properly, and instead shortcut this measure with just rinsing their hands with just water, no soap. Just rinsing hands with water is not enough to get rid of disease-causing germs.
There are 5 easy steps for proper and effective handwashing.
1. Wet your hands with clean running water, then apply soap.
2. Rub and scrub your hands together until the soap foams up. Spread the lather to cover the entirety of your hands, including the back of your hands, your palms, under your nails, between your fingers, and your wrists, or even a little past the wrists.
3. Scrub your hands thoroughly for at least 20 seconds to make sure that you DO NOT MISS A SPOT. If it goes beyond 20 seconds for you to do this properly, that’s fine.
4. Rinse your hands thoroughly under clean running water. Ideally, the water should flow from your fingertips down to your wrists, not the other way around (the rationale here is that if there are microbes on your wrists or arms, which you did not wash, flowing water from the arm-side going to the fingertips would simply contaminate your hands again).
5. Dry your hands with a disposable paper towel or an air dryer. If you are using a cloth towel to dry your hands, make sure that cloth towel is in itself not contaminated.
Do this FREQUENTLY because there is a possibility that you will be picking up the virus several times over the course of a normal day. When you hold handrails, doorknobs, common surfaces or even the occasional hand shake (which is no longer encouraged), all of these have the potential to be harboring the virus, which could easily come onto your hands. And if you touch your face (some people do this habitually and thus do not even notice they are doing it), the virus gets closer to being in your mouth or nose, or even your eyes, and eventually in your respiratory tract.
Recommended For You
