Do gloves help protect against the coronavirus?

You have NO idea how many hand puns I wanted to put in this subject line.

Welcome to Not a Doctor, the only newsletter about health and science that deletes more puns than you could ever imagine.

I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect. I’m not a doctor, or a scientist, or really an expert of any kind. I just like to ask questions and try to find the answers to them.

I’ve gotten a few questions about hand hygiene and gloves, so today, it’s all about the digits, baby.

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Can gloves protect me?

Gloves do provide some measure of protection, but it’s even more complicated than wearing a mask.

First of all: this virus isn’t like Ebola, which can be passed by skin-to-skin contact. Instead, the coronavirus hooks into your mucous membranes — mouth, nose, and eyes. So you should focus on protecting those parts of your body most — particularly by keeping your hands clean and not touching your face.

Gloves can help, though, to some extent. For instance, if you’re going to the grocery store, you can wear gloves and then VERY CAREFULLY take them off before you touch your wallet, keys, or steering wheel. (It’s still important to sanitize those things after you’ve been out, though, and to wash your hands whenever possible.)

Gloves can also keep your hands from getting chapped if you have to go out a lot and wash your hands a ton. (If you’ve got red, flaky hands anyway, I highly recommend using Nivea Crème at least once a day. It’s rescued my poor cracked skin.)

Here’s the problem with gloves, though: they’re even trickier to take off without contaminating yourself than a mask is.

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How to remove gloves safely

The CDC has an excellent visual guide for taking off gloves. Here’s a quick excerpt, but you should check out the full poster.

Source: CDC

For the first hand, pinch the glove right below the wrist. Pull off carefully. Don’t slide your gloved thumb inside the opening — that would contaminate your hand with whatever was on that glove, making them pointless.

Then, use your ungloved fingers to roll the second glove off into a ball without touching the outside of the glove with your bare hand.

As soon as you get home, wash your hands thoroughly just in case.

You’re supposed to throw away nitrile gloves after every use, although in a pinch you could probably store them in a paper bag for at least seven days.

Also, I trust that you wonderful readers are throwing your disposable gloves directly in the trash, right? Not in the shopping cart or parking lot!

Nitrile gloves are part of a health worker’s personal protective equipment, so I’m extremely wary of recommending that you buy them, since we have such widespread shortages of supplies.

We have rubber dishwashing gloves that we’ll use whenever we need to venture out on essential tasks; we’ll clean them after each use. You could also use thick cloth gloves — like mittens or other winter gloves — that you wash each time.

The same rules apply about very carefully removing them so you don’t contaminate yourself.

Above all, remember: don’t do anything in gloves that you wouldn’t do with your bare hands! They don’t give you a free pass to shake hands or touch things you normally wouldn’t. And always, always, wash your hands and don’t touch your face.

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I cut myself on an Amazon box! Do I have COVID of the finger now?

This is a really good question. There are actually some pretty nasty ailments that you can get through a cut in the skin — usually bacterial infections like anthrax or tuberculosis.

But there’s no evidence that this coronavirus can enter the body that way.

If you get a cut, though, be sure to take extra good care of it, washing it thoroughly and using a disinfectant like Neosporin. No one wants to wind up in the doctor’s office over something like this right now!

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Wash, wash, wash

By now, you all know the importance of handwashing, and you’ve probably seen a million how-to videos. I wanted to share this one, though, in case you haven’t seen it yet. Even this handwashing enthusiast learned a trick or two.

Source: David Gravelle/YouTube

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As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or handwashing tips, please comment below or email me at melodyaschreiber@gmail.com.

And if you know someone who might appreciate this newsletter, please forward it to them and share the (glove) love!