Grocery stores are pretty much the only place that we are seeing people on a regular basis. In the midst of the coronavirus crisis people are staying inside and doing their best to be clean and safe. That is often easier said than done, however. Many people really have no idea how germs spread and don’t know how to utilize their equipment, even if they have the supplies they need.

This nurse noticed that people were wearing the right equipment but still doing everything wrong!

Molly Lixey is a nurse who is active during the coronavirus outbreak. On a recent trip to the store, Lixey noticed that people were wearing all the right PPE (personal protective equipment) but still not following the directions for best usage. After seeing this, she decided to get on Facebook and make a video that explains to people the idea of cross-contamination.

Giving a demonstration, Lixey puts on her own gloves and proves her point.

Wearing her blue gloves, Lixey is pretending that she is in a store herself and interreacting how many people normally would. She takes a cardboard cutout of a rectangle and tells us that it is going to represent our phones.

Going through the normal process that many of us would normally take, she shows where we go wrong.

Lixey “wipes down her cart” and all the normal things that most people are currently doing. She even has gloves on, something that many people are using right now. It gets interesting when she starts to “pick up” items in the store (just a reminder, this is an example and she wasn’t in the store). She uses a plate that has paint on it to represent toilet paper and other items that we would grab from the store.

Getting paint (germs) all over her hands, she then reaches for her phone.

Using her paint-covered gloves, she grabs the phone and texts her husband back about dinner. She ends up touching her phone over and over. At one point, she even toucher her face for a small itch. By the end of the demonstration, she has paint all over her face, ear, phone, and car handles.

When she safely takes off her gloves, she is already too late.

Showing us that by the time that you take off the gloves in your car, the usefulness of them is already over. She is paint smeared everywhere! Even worse, she says that people are leaving their gloves in the parking lot on the ground, increasing risk for people cleaning.

When you are in your car and you have touched your phone, the precautions aren’t doing anything.

The point to remember from this educational little video is the idea of cross-contamination. When you use your gloves to touch something, it is important that you then don’t use those gloves to touch anything else that you will then touch with your hands later. Once something is cross-contaminated, it is much harder to sanitize and keep things clean!

Check out the video she posted below! The illustration is extremely helpful to understand how germs work!

Please SHARE this with your friends and family.

Source: Molly Lixey, Bored Panda