Rigorous Hand-Washing Will Be Part of Covid-19's New Normal
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has committed to reopening the economy at all costs, the White House coronavirus task force has vanished from view, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was silenced for three full months—and a coronavirus vaccine is more than a year away. As the United States opens up piecemeal from lockdown, what happens next in the pandemic is being left up to the decisions each of us make: to observe social distancing, to wear a mask, and most of all, to wash your hands. The last of these is the simplest to do, and was the first piece of pandemic health care advice most of us got. But as the people who do it most—health care workers—can testify, it’s challenging to do it consistently and well.
It’s been 174 years since obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that two wards in a Vienna maternity hospital had strikingly different rates of post-childbirth infections—and that what made the difference was whether or not the health care personnel taking care of the new mothers washed their hands before examining them. It’s been two decades since an explosion of superbug and C. diff epidemics demonstrated how many of the 2 million infections that occur in hospitals each year are passed between patients by health care workers. Handwashing in health care is pushed by the CDC, it’s a favorite message of the World Health Organization, and it’s the backdrop to the entire medical specialty of infection prevention and control.
Yet it’s a surprisingly difficult thing to get health care workers to do. Even though they’re bombarded with messages every day of their working lives, the CDC estimates that health care workers clean their hands on average less than half the times they should. That’s despite knowing that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the infections that occur in health care settings in the US each year could be prevented if hand hygiene was followed more faithfully. “Hand hygiene is the bane of our existence,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease preventionist and epidemiologist in Phoenix. “No one gets it right all the time.”
This is an important thing to think about, because as we move into Covid-19’s new normal, all us civilians will need to routinely do things that even professionals find hard. And we’ll mostly be making the decisions to do them (or not) out of our own volition, because there’s not yet a public health campaign—the kind that puts commercials between TV shows and signs on bus shelters—to remind us. A good portion of the population may not even have a memory of what those are like: The seat belt campaigns of the 1980s and the condom-use campaigns of the 1990s are a generation in the past.
https://www.wired.com/story/rigorous-hand-washing-will-be-part-of-covid-19s-new-normal/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_Science_060320&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=WIR_Science&bxid=5be9f8cb24c17c6adf0e5d24&cndid=25394153&esrc=bounceX&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_SCIENCE_ZZ
