3 obvious — and 5 less obvious — tips to be safe in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak
The familar ones:
- wash your hands frequently and properly;
- cover your mouth (with your arm) when
coughing or sneezing;
- avoid close contact with those who are
already infected.
Before brushing off
the above as obvious, we should ask ourselves: do we do these with complete
consistency? Can we do better? Consider also the following less obvious but
equally important behaviours:
1. Disinfect your
mobile device screen twice per day — it is a portable petri dish, accumulating bacteria and, yes, viruses.
Antibacterial wipes are necessary here, as they generally kill viruses as well.
Clean your device at least twice daily, once at lunch and once at dinner time
(or linked to another daily routine). A recently
published study estimates that viruses like COVID-19 may be able to
persist for up to nine days on smooth glass and plastic surfaces, like a mobile
phone screen.
2. Avoid touching your face. Your mouth, nose, eyes and ears are all routes into your body for
viruses, and your fingers are constantly in touch with surfaces that may
contain viruses. This simple measure is very hard to maintain consistently, but
is essential for infection control.
3. Use masks only if you are yourself ill and give social kudos to people who are
responsible enough to use them when sick.
4. Self-quarantine if you are ill and have a fever.
5. Engage your social network to brainstorm other simple behavioural
changes.
Preventing spread
Strengthening herd
immunity through behaviour is critical to preventing COVID-19 spread. We need
to be talking about it more, and doing it more. In the sea of fear-provoking uncertainties, this is something that we are
in control of individually and en masse.
Let’s do better about
implementing the above precautionary behaviours with high consistency, and over
the long-term. And here’s a side
benefit: we will be preventing many other infectious illnesses from spreading,
including seasonal influenza, which kills more people in an average month than COVID-19 did
last month.
