How to Wash Your Hands

You’ve probably been washing your hands obsessively recently.  But unless you’ve worked in the medical field or a research lab setting, and therefore learned surgical hand-washing technique, odds are good you’ve been missing a ton of (virus-harboring) spots.

This simple, brilliant demo drives that point home.  Watch it, practice washing correctly a few times, then watch it again to make sure the details all sunk in:

 

[And, as a few people have asked of late, some of the other things I’ve been doing to stay (overly) safe:

  • Staying inside completely, aside from a daily walk with Jess during a quiet time of day, along relatively deserted routes, and giving people 20+ feet of leeway along the way.
  • Skipping delivery, and cooking our own food instead.
  • Buying groceries, toiletries, and everything else online only.
  • On the rare occasion I do need to head out for errands / to do laundry in our building  / etc., wearing a disposable latex glove on my right hand. I use that hand to touch anything other people have touched (laundry machine, credit card pin pad, etc.), and use the other to touch anything of my own (the clean laundry, my phone, etc.)
  • Showering as soon as I get back home, along with wiping down my phone, and washing my glasses.
  • Letting all packages, and non-perishable groceries, sit for at least 48 hours in a staging area by our door before bringing them into the rest of our apartment.
  • For perishable groceries, Lysol-wiping packages thoroughly before putting them in the freezer or refrigerator.  
  • For unpackaged produce, putting it in the sink, squirting in some dish soap, and then filling up the sink and agitating in the suds.  Then draining, and refilling and draining twice more with clean water to rinse.
  • Buying a pulse oximeter on Amazon, in case we do get sick.  (On the idea that the only two reasons to head to ER would be a substantially spiked fever [>103°] or a drop in O2Sat (<88%); self-testing would let us know if it was no longer wise to just quarantine, hydrate, and wait it out.)
  • Similarly, practicing listening to each other’s chests when we breathe, to get a baseline for normal lung function to compare against when listening for crackling / bubbling / rumbling during breathing, the symptoms of pneumonia.
  • Stocking some hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, in case trials pan out, but inventory doesn’t keep pace with demand.

I’ll add to the list as more of my OCD virus-phobic practices come come to mind.  Though, if you have similarly nuts ones you’re engaging in, I’d love hear about them.]

March 22, 2020