Coronavirus #3: Should We Wear Gloves?
On my last post, I looked at the question of wearing masks in public. Today we will look at gloves.
The issue of gloves is simpler than masks. The bottom line is, if you want to keep from getting or spreading COVID in public settings such as grocery shopping, gloves are not likely to help.
To understand why, you have to understand why gloves protect people from acquiring diseases. Most people assume the benefit is that the gloves form a barrier between the person and the virus. This is wrong.
The biggest benefit to wearing gloves is that you can take them off. If you are grocery shopping and you pick up virus on your gloves, the virus stays there, just like it does on your skin. Gloves are not cleaner than hands. In fact, gloves tend to be much dirtier than bare hands, because most people will pick up or touch things with gloves that they would not consider touching with unprotected skin. As with masks, gloves can provide a false sense of security.
But when you take a pair of gloves off, the gloves go in the trash, and the virus goes with it. Removing gloves is a lot like washing your hands — it gets the virus off of you. If you do not change gloves often, you are not helping yourself. The gloves are picking up virus as fast as your hands would, and you are not washing your hands, because you have gloves on.
The best way to prevent contamination of your hands is to wash your hands often. This has been said a million times by many people other than me, and for a reason. Because it is true. When I am in the hospital, I use gloves, but I dispose of them after seeing a patient. (And then I wash my hands. Hand washing is a step that you cannot ever skip.) If there is a glove shortage, some hospital personnel will use gloves with more than one patient, but this is a poor solution — all this does is allow contaminated gloves to spread infectants from person to person. For all that the health worker might as well go barehanded and wash after each patient.
The point again: If you do not change gloves after every contact, they are of no use to you.
The best thing the average person can do when in public is to bring hand sanitizer and clean his or her hands every few minutes. Hand sanitizer is in short supply these days, so the alternative is to wash before and after entering a public place such as a grocery store, and to avoid touching your face while you are there. (This is the one situation where a mask may be of help, since a mask reminds you not to touch your face.) But if you wear gloves and touch your face, you have not helped yourself. The virus can pass from a glove to your nose and mouth just as easily as from your hands.
To summarize: The point of gloves is that you take them off. Only when you dispose of a pair of gloves are you preventing yourself from getting the virus. Otherwise, they serve no purpose at all, since coronavirus does not pass into the body through the hands, only through the nose, mouth, and possibly the eyes. And if you touch your face with a gloved hand, you’ve infected yourself.
Careful hand washing and sanitizing is always, always, always better than keeping a pair of gloves on for a long period of time. If you must wear gloves, put them on as soon as you enter a public facility, and remove them as soon as you leave. Then sanitize your hands after you have disposed of the gloves.
