How to Use Disposable Gloves Safely
The CDC does not recommend the use of gloves as a daily precaution, but I know that many people choose to wear disposable gloves when they go out, for example when shopping for groceries . If you do use gloves, it is important to wear them correctly. Otherwise, they can harm them even more.
What Gloves Really Do
You will not get sick from skin infection with coronavirus; you get sick due to the virus getting into the holes in your face. This is why we wash our hands: if a virus gets on our hands, you wash it off before touching your face.
Thus, the point of wearing gloves is not to protect the skin from the virus. This is to keep the virus out of your gloves so you can take off your gloves and have clean hands again. “Failure to change gloves when needed is no different than not washing your hands,” microbiologist Simon Clarke writes in The Conversation.
However, it is best to wash your hands before and after wearing gloves, just to make sure you don’t get your gloves dirty, or vice versa.
You still need to pay attention to what you touch
If you touch a doorknob and then touch your face, you may just have infected your face with a virus, whether you are wearing gloves or not.
One of the dangers of wearing gloves is that people tend to think they are protected and then carelessly touch clean and dirty things with the same pair of gloves. Have you ever seen someone in a sandwich shop take your money with gloves on and then sandwich the next person with the same gloves? This is exactly what you don’t want to do.
Therefore, if you are shopping with gloves, you should take off your gloves before touching your phone or wallet. Or, if you touch these things with gloves, remember to clean them later.
Know how to safely take off your gloves
If the outside of the glove is dirty, you should not touch your other clean hand with this glove when you take it off. So technique is important here.
There are many videos showing the correct technique, but I lovethis one because it uses sticky barbecue sauce to get things done. If you are trying to keep clean and dirty surfaces away from each other, act like everything is covered in barbecue sauce . Could you touch your face with your hand with barbecue sauce? Would you touch your phone with it? I didn’t think so.
Know the disadvantages of wearing gloves
Everything has its pros and cons, including wearing gloves. An important one is that gloves are part of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) that medical workers need to do their job safely. Just like we leave medical masks to professionals, it is wise to leave gloves to them.
You should also be aware that if you see other people wearing gloves, they may not know what to do and what not to do as well as you do. You don’t know what they touched with these gloves.
Gloves also break over time, so if you use the same pair over and over they can break. (You also have to worry about contamination between uses, since as you saw in the video above, the gloves end up turned inside out when you finish taking them off.) If you want to try washing or sanitizing your gloves while you … If you wear them , check with the glove manufacturer. Some of the materials used in gloves are degraded by contact with certain chemicals.
If you are wearing gloves and a mask, take off your gloves and wash your hands before removing the mask. Otherwise, you touch your face and hair with dirty hands.
Finally, if you are wearing gloves, dispose of them safely. In the trash can, please.