Gotta fly? Wash your hands early and often to keep COVID-19 from following you home
At the airport, wash your hands more than you think you should. (Pexels/)Washing your hands prevents the spread of many diseases. Public health officials and doctors know it, and there’s studies to back it up. That includes one as recent as December 2019 which showed that if a small fraction of the people who pass through airports wash their hands with more regularity it could have a huge impact on the spread of a new disease such as COVID-19. But getting people to actually perform this illness-preventing measure is another story.“People know that there is a disease now,” says study author Christos Nikolaides, a professor at the University of Cyprus who studies how contagions spread. That means far more people are likely washing their hands than they normally would, he says. But at any regular time, he says, only about one in five people in airports have clean hands. That’s...