Coronavirus ~ COVID-19

[Cin]

Originally Posted by cathexis

Fear of people with gloves on is reasonable. I would recoil from a person who walked up trying to touch me nor would I go around touching random patients, but the one being touched does not know that. The only acts a worker can perform in my room with already donned gloves would involve possibly contaminated items. What I would wear the gloves for include door handles, faucet handles, elevator buttons, trash, bodily fluids and the like. I would not touch my face with a gloved hand (30 years as a Critical Care RN).
Gloves would be changed frequently with brisk hand washing. It's difficult to maintain, but know I can last 16 hours in isolation, and rarely away from home base that long recalling the days of private duty of HIV before anyone knew what it was and what precautions to take. I consider everything in home base somewhere on the clean end of my clean/contaminated scale.
Indeed aerosol, droplet contamination is a problem. The sclera is exposed unless one also has a face shield on. Pretty soon we will have people walking around gowned for full isolation. I want my shoe covers and hat too.lol We had better get a vaccine or herd immunity soon.

I am not concerned with health care professionals wearing gloves, but the average person makes me nervous. I worry they will think gloves are a substitute for washing their hands and it concerns me how often people might try to reuse them or just wear the same pair all day. Masks are necessary for everyone for sure even though they pose possibilities for misuse and contamination and one should educate oneself on mask safety. But I don't think gloves, outside of healthcare and food service,are really necessary for the average person under usual circumstances. It just adds another element that can go wrong to an already complicated situation. If you can't wash your hands for some reason and have a few pairs it's certainly helpful. I just see so much potential for misuse and cross contamination for the average person with gloves. I think masks are risky enough, but necessary.

Ya, the sclera is a problem with aerosol contamination but I imagine it would take a direct hit from a cough or a sneeze to send enough of a viral load into your eyes and it probably would get through a mask as well unless it's an N-95. Hopefully there is only short-range aerosol transmission mostly in crowded, poorly ventilated spaces. Hopefully droplets don't hang in the air long enough either. But who knows.This virus might be more contagious than first believed.If you cannot maintain a safe distance and have to be indoors with people outside of your bubble I suppose a face shield over a mask is the best course of action. However, I find it hard to breath like that. But I would find it harder to breath on a ventilator I'm sure. I guess I'm hoping that just a mask will do the trick. But maybe just a shield is better than just a mask for the average person doing average daily activities. Masks often move around and require adjusting and therefore put you at risk of contamination. Shields don't do that. But I have masks so...

LOL. shoe covers, hat, gown yep. I'm kidding but who knows what the future holds, this virus is a tad on the wimpy side and yet pretty much brought the world to its knees, god help us if the next one is both deadly and airborne with a robust protein shell making it hard to kill.