Adelia C. Solarman
Ever since the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, the majority of us have wisely decided to distance ourselves socially - as we should - and routinely washed our hands with soap or hand sanitizer, thinking this would kill the coronavirus should we have picked it up throughout the day. However, it is not quite this simple, and this article will briefly summarize how you’ve been washing your hands wrong, and what you can do to easily change this.
As you might have already heard, soap - any kind of soap - is incredibly effective in killing many viruses, including the coronavirus. To put it simply, the coronavirus is surrounded by a coating of fat, making it behave somewhat like oil. When oil - like the virus - is mixed with water, it does not mix. But if mixed with soap, the oil easily dissolved into water. This is because, inside soap, there are two-sided molecules, one attracted to water, and the other attracted to fat. When soap is mixed with fat and water, it essentially breaks apart the fat and disperses them in water. With that, you could easily wash the coronavirus down the drain by washing your hands with soap.
So what have we been doing wrong? Well, it turns out that this process takes a bit of time to work. The fats don’t instantly dissolve and get washed away. An attached Youtube video by Vox demonstrates this quite well, showing that, when you only wash your hands for only five, or even ten seconds, the virus is still present in your hands. Taking 20 full seconds of washing your hands is enough for the process to work and the virus to be broken down. If you’re not near a bathroom and want to clean your hands, use a hand sanitizer of at least 60% alcohol concentration, as recommended by the CDC. However, soap is still much more reliable, so definitely wash your hands if possible. Again, wash your hands for 20 full seconds, otherwise you haven’t done enough to was away the coronavirus, and all your efforts would have been for naught, and buy a 60%+ alcohol sanitizer for when you’re not near a bathroom.
See a full video on this here:
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