LOS ANGELES — We all touch our face. With this new coronavirus outbreak, how do we stop?
Touching our faces is a real health risk. So in this new world, not only is nose picking thought to be gross, but so is nose scratching, mouth touching and eye rubbing. All it takes is just one virus to hitch a ride on a contaminated finger and slip into the body through a nostril or a wet part of the face.
Then the virus can latch on, finding a human cell in the throat, nose or sinuses to hijack and destroy it, flooding the body with even more copies of itself. In critical illnesses, that one careless touch from an unwashed finger can begin a process of destroying lungs and kidneys and, in a worst-case scenario, trigger septic shock, multiple organ failure and make it impossible to breathe on your own.
And yet. It’s still so, so hard to stop touching our faces. Much of time it’s spontaneous, and we aren’t even aware of it. One study caught medical students in class touching their faces 23 times per hour on average.
