How to wash your hands amidst COVID-19
by Ishitaa Sachdeva on September 10, 2020
Safe hands will secure you
COVID 19 primarily transmits through air droplets and direct contact. One can get infected by touching a COVID 19 patient, or by touching other contaminated surfaces or objects. Thus, our hands play a major role in transmitting the COVID-19 causing coronavirus.
When we touch these contaminated surfaces with our hands and then touch our eyes, nose, or mouth with unclean hands, we expose ourselves to the disease-causing virus and become a part of the chain that the world is desperately trying to break.
The responsibility to keep our community and ourselves safe is upon us. Hand hygiene is one of the most important things that need to be practiced in our day to day lives to prevent the transmission of pathogens, viruses, and most importantly, the COVID 19 causing coronavirus.
We, as the members of the community, are responsible for breaking the coronavirus chain by implementing simple and effective hand hygiene measures. Many famous companies are joining hands with the World Health organization to promote the importance of hand hygiene for the sake of public welfare and interest, and how it can protect us from impending doom.
The hand hygiene guidelines drafted and published worldwide specifically for the COVID 19 pandemic mandate everybody to wash their hands with soap and running water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, every two hours.
Washing hands in a hurry are of no good, and its guidelines mention that our hands should be cleaned and rinsed with running water, for 40- 60 seconds to remove or kill all the germs for the surface of our hands.
We are to ensure that we wash not just the palm of our hands, but thoroughly clean the corners of our nails, the ridge between our fingers, and the upper side of our hand with soap and running water.
One can also use other alternatives like an alcohol-based hand rub for 20- 30 seconds, but they do not completely clean grease and oil from our hands. The WHO global hand hygiene campaign, "SAVE LIVES: Clean your hands" is deploying people all around the globe to make sure that the proper hand hygiene norms are being followed, especially in places like hospitals, clinics,
and other health care centers.
This campaign acknowledges the risk that the doctors, nurses, and
the other frontline warriors are putting themselves in and fighting hand in hand with each other, against the COVID 19 causing coronavirus.
