You Shouldn't Be Wearing Gloves to Go Grocery Shopping

Does wearing gloves make grocery shopping safer? First of all, grocery shopping, if you observe the current novel coronavirus safety recommendations, isnt ask risky as some parts of the internet have made it out to be ( get point-by-point clarity on that here ).

Second, and more importantly, it could be causing a lot more harm than good, explains Reynolds. There are a number of issues:

Gloves are like hands when it comes to spreading viruses; maybe even worse.

This novel coronavirus doesnt enter the body through your hands, so you dont need any kind of barrier there. If you touch a contaminated surface with gloves, and touch something else, youre as likely to spread it as you are if you touch things with your bare hands. Maybe even more likely: The adhesive properties of viruses differ among viruses; its possible the coronavirus could adhere to the latex gloves better than it could adhere to your own skin, says Reynolds. And hands can be effectively washed and used again right away.

Gloves can give you a false sense of security.

And its easy to let your guard down on hand washing when you use gloves, Reynolds says. Plus, wearing them from one errand to another just spreads germs and the novel coronavirus to all those places. (Whereas bare hands would get a squirt of hand sanitizer in between, or a stop at a sink for a good, old-fashioned soap and water wash.)

Very few people take gloves off right.

And when you dont take gloves off properly, you just get everything that was all over the gloves all over yourself and everything else. Taking gloves off right isnt a trivial thing, Reynolds says. Weve done studies observing healthcare workers and how they remove the gloves, and about 30 percent do it wrongand theyve been trained.

How to remove rubber gloves right : In a nutshell, you want to pinch one glove near the wrist and pull it over your hand so it ends up inside out. Then hold that in your gloved hand and carefully slip the fingers of your bare hand into the top of the other glove, let it turn inside out and cover the balled-up other glove. Better yet, check out this step-by-step CDC infographic . Dispose of themif youre not disposing of them properly, youre just potentially contaminating more surfaces and putting yourself at a much higher risk, Reynolds says. Dont skip hand washing after you take them off, even if you remove them right.

So why is it standard procedure for healthcare workers to wear gloves, but not the average person?

Healthcare workers wear gloves for short periods of time while theyre working directly with patients. If youre one of them, Reynolds explains, when you have gloves on, its for patient service; youre not walking around the room with the gloves on touching everything. After serving the patient, you leave the gloves in the room, wash your hands, and leave the room to serve the next patient without dragging those germs with you. Its a completely different activity than if youre just going to the grocery store. So for trips to the supermarket its the same refrain: Go (ungloved), get what you need, and wash your hands .