If you’ve ventured out lately, you’ve probably noticed lots of people wearing gloves. At the grocery store. Driving their car. Even when out walking their dog. Does this protect against #COVID19? The answer is that gloves are only as effective as how you use them. A thread. 
Before I dive in, I need to start by saying that unless you are performing medical or lab procedures where you’re likely to come in contact with bodily fluids or other toxic materials, you probably don’t need latex or nitrile gloves. Let’s save those for people who need them.
The purpose of gloves is twofold: to protect you from the things you touch and to protect the things you touch from you. However, this all breaks down if you aren’t super careful to distinguish between “clean” and “contaminated.”
In the case of COVID-19, you can’t see the virus, so it’s hard to visualize “clean” and “contaminated.” But, we can think of it in terms of muddy shoes. If you’ve ever worked or played outside after the rain, you know that your shoes are going to get muddy.
You know that your shoes protect your feet from getting muddy, but this is all pointless if you keep your muddy shoes on when you come back inside your house. Before you know it, you’ll have mud tracked all over your house and it will be a huge mess.
The way we get around this is by having some sort of “mudroom.” In our house, we have a super (not) fancy mudroom known as “the corner of the garage.” But, it serves it’s purpose. Anyone who has muddy shoes takes them off there before coming in the house.
Gloves are meant to work the same way. If you’re going to the store and don’t feel great about touching that shopping cart with your bare hands, it’s fine to wear gloves. But, you need to realize that your gloves have now become contaminated.
If you push around the shopping cart and then use your gloved hand to check your cell phone, reach for your wallet, or push a stray hair off of your face, you have now spread anything that was on that shopping cart to everything you’ve touched.
In a lab setting, we deal with this reality by having “clean” and “contaminated” spaces. When we’re in lab, we assume everything is contaminated. We touch things with gloved hands, and then make sure those gloves don’t touch anything that should be clean, like our cell phones.
When we leave lab, we take off our gloves, wash our hands, and only then resume touching things that should be “clean” – door handles, computer keyboards, our lunch. There’s even an art to taking off your gloves without touching the outside of them:
Where does this leave the verdict on whether you should wear gloves while shopping? The virus can’t go through your skin, so wearing gloves doesn’t offer much protection beyond what a good handwashing provides. But, they might help you remember not to touch things like your face.
If you do decide to wear gloves, really any kind will do. Pick up some food service gloves, put ziplock bags over your hands, or even just wear cotton or wool glove liners that you can wash and reuse. Again, save the latex and nitrile gloves for those who need them.
And, whether you wear gloves or not, decide what your “mudroom” is – the place where you go from contaminated to clean. When I go shopping, my car is this transition point. I use hand sanitizer as soon as I’m inside my car, but I still treat everything in my car as contaminated.
In summary, gloves don’t inherently protect you – they only work as well as how you use them. More important is to keep track of when your hands are clean or contaminated and act accordingly. Doing so is an important habit now and will help to keep you healthy in the future too.
