These Hands, Trapped In Ignorance

For the last few weeks, we’ve been bombarded with everything Coronavirus. Figures, symptoms, countries, cases, chaos. Do we come to work? Do we send our children to school? Do we now namaste to each other at the end of business meetings? Amidst all the headlines that sound like the introduction to every terrible disaster movie out there, how do we maintain our sense of normalcy in a world that is currently anything but? As we sit a little further away from our colleagues and slather ourselves in sanitizer, what lessons can we take back from this challenging time that aren’t just about washing our hands for the time it takes to sing two rounds of ‘happy birthday’?

With just basic hand washing, we could avoid diseases spreading like wildfire. A recent study by MIT found that if 60% of travellers moving through airports worldwide had clean hands, global disease spread could be curbed by almost 70%. Seems like common sense, right? So why is it that that only 20% of us actually have clean hands?

The speedy spread of the virus shows we don’t take hygiene seriously enough

We’re being told – over and over – to keep washing our hands. Wash your hands after contact with the outside, handling money, dealing with ill people – and, while the news is telling us to do this, is any of this actual NEWS? Haven’t we all been supposed to be doing that anyway? This, coupled with the rapid spread of the virus, shows that actually, most of us would be fired very fast from any job that required us to maintain strict health & safety codes. Good waiters, cooks and medical staff we are not.

If you’re applying yet another layer of sanitizer after reading that, I can’t blame you. But I also have to tell you it’s not much help until we all begin taking our hygiene a little more seriously. The average person shakes hands over 15,000 times over their lifetime – double or triple that for anyone who’s active in business – and then let’s just imagine shaking hands with someone who last washed their hands when you had your suit dry cleaned. Usually, we’re none the wiser about our palms now becoming pretty impressive petri dishes. But throw in a virus none of us have any immunity against, and watch it spread like wildfire when none of us wash our hands when we’re supposed to.

They told us so. We didn’t quite listen.

As it turns out, the bathroom posters telling us to wash our hands weren’t just put there so we’d have some light reading material while we’re doing our business. The soaps and sanitizers at the pot wash or pantry aren’t just there to reward our button-pressing pleasure centers. They were put there due to rules and regulations that were created a long time ago by health & safety specialists who have been trying to get us to use soap and water at hygiene hot spots for the last few decades. In fact, these companies have been doing such a good job at communicating proper hygiene conduct, and we’re so used to seeing their messaging, that ironically, we’ve become desensitized to it. We anticipate these infographics and reminders so much we almost see them as part of the décor as we’re lathering up – failing to understand the reason why it’s so important we wash our hands. And now, as we’re looking at a global pandemic and over 100,000 infected across 110 countries, I can only image the teams behind the health & safety campaigns we’ve been taking for granted having the biggest, most satisfying, most schadenfreude ‘I told you so’ moment the world has ever seen.

It shouldn’t have to take a global pandemic to make us wash our hands

At the end of the day, COVID-19 will soon be under control and joins SARS, swine flu H1N1, avian influenza and Ebola in the hall of scary diseases that spiraled out of control because basic health & safety practices were not followed by a significant portion of the human population. We didn’t think it was that big a deal if we sort of sneezed into our palm and went ahead and typed on a colleague’s keyboard. We thought it will be okay just this once if we were in a hurry and started making dinner right after coming home and taking our shoes off. We rubbed our eyes after a long day of travel and meetings, when we didn’t even have time to breathe let alone wash our hands. Usually, our immune systems are hardy enough to fight off any germs we collect like this without us even realizing, and life carries on as normal and we don’t see any consequences to our breach of hygiene.

These transgressions can occur anywhere, and everywhere – a few well-timed sneezes in the office pantry, a missed hand wash by someone working in a cafeteria – these seemingly insignificant things can eliminate an entire workforce with flu (or, in this case, COVID-19) for weeks at a stretch. Hundreds of man hours down the drain and projects jeopardized over something that could be completely preventable with the right training and preparedness.

How many more global epidemics do we need before we realise soap and water are essential? Once COVID-19 is over, how many of us will stop reaching for the sanitizer as the sense of panic fades, and fall back into old habits until the cycle repeats itself again?

What will it take before we treat hygiene as an essential part of our day, and not an option?