The key way to avoid infection is by sanitizing your hands regularly and not touching your face.
As you walk around the supermarket, you may notice some of your fellow shoppers are wearing rubber gloves. One woman picks up a box of cereal, puts it back, touches her face with her gloved hand and tucks her hair behind her ear. She then pulls out her phone to consult her shopping list.
“What good are gloves going to do?” asks Professor Sally Bloomfield, honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Whilst you’re walking around the supermarket, you could easily touch your nose, mouth and eyes with gloved hands. The only reason it might help is if you remember you have gloves on and think: ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t touch my face’.
For the general public, this doesn’t make sense. Gloves are just “an extension of our hands”, says Prof Bloomfield – and wearing them could be lulling people into a false sense of security and making them think that they’re protected, when they aren’t necessarily. While disposable gloves are not a replacement for hand washing, Dr. Ed Wright, senior lecturer in microbiology at the University of Sussex, says they can act as a form of protection when hand-washing isn’t possible, hand sanitizer isn’t available and you are unsure whether or not a surface is contaminated – but only if used and disposed of safely
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