"If you have gloves on, and you’ve touched something, treat your hands as if they were contaminated. Period."
In a matter of days, we went from seeing no one wearing a mask and gloves in public to just about everyone wearing a mask and gloves in public. The goal of wearing personal protective equipment, is to prevent transmitting or acquiring COVID-19.
However, when this equipment isn't used properly it can be more dangerous than not wearing any at all.
If you've been told to use gloves by an employer or you feel they are best for your personal protection, it's very important to take the proper safety precautions.
Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and Associate Professor of climate science at the University of Maine, is used to wearing gloves when she does field work. As an ICE Age ecologist, she has to be careful not to contaminate ancient specimens she comes across in the frozen tundra.
So to inform the public on the safe way to wear gloves, she took to Twitter.
If all of her wisdom is news to you, don't feel bad, most people aren't professionally trained to wear gloves.
The big benefit to wearing gloves is that they're disposable.
You can easily transmit the virus while wearing gloves.
Even though you're wearing gloves, you still have to wash your hands.
If it rips, it's time to replace.
Don't wash and re-use your gloves.
This seems obvious, but ...
Gill's tweet thread discusses the importance of removing gloves safely to prevent the spread of disease. Here's the Centers for Disease Controls tips on how to do so properly.
A seven-step guide from the CDC outlines how to properly remove gloves to avoid unintentional germ transmission.
- Grasp the outside of one glove at the wrist. Do not touch your bare skin.
- Peel the glove away from your body, pulling it inside out.
- Hold the glove you just removed in your gloved hand.
- Peel off the second glove by putting your fingers inside the glove at the bottom of your wrist.
- Turn the second glove inside out while pulling it away from your body, leaving the first glove inside the second.
- Dispose of the gloves safely. Do not reuse the gloves.
- Clean your hand immediately after removing gloves.
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