How to use PPE, or gloves and a mask.

It’s been a strange time and now folks are using medical gloves everywhere they go. As someone with a tiny bit of OCD, seeing Karen in Costco graze her gloved hands over every surface, her mouth, her face, all the things, make my insides shrivel up and die.

It has become rapidly apparent that the average person doesn’t understand PPE, which is understandable, none of y’all work in the medical field.

So what is PPE and …droplet precautions?

Personal Protective Equipment is anything that protects your health and safety. It could be medical gloves, a full gown or a HAZMAT suit. Right now, the world is trying to protect itself from COVID19, something that requires droplet precautions.

A little about COVID19: soap and water can kill the virus, so washing your hands, surfaces and clothes are all essential. Store your dirty laundry together, and in a separate space from, say, your living room. Wash your hands frequently, avoid touching your face without washing your hands first, and wipe down surfaces more often than you normally would.

Viruses can be contagious when we’re exposed to enough of the virus — depending on our own immune system and general health, being exposed to a “little bit” of the virus might not make us sick right away (like a spore on a counter) but being exposed to a lot of it (someone who is sick coughing in your face) can make you sick right away.

Face masks for containing and protecting.

Because the virus can be spread through droplets it’s important that we use masks for two reasons. First to limit the spread of the virus — if someone who is infected is coughing into a proper filtering mask, then they can’t spread droplets as easily, while someone wearing a mask can’t be exposed to the virus as easily. N95’s are truly the best mask to use, however, a cloth face mask with inserted N95 filters or HEPA filters can work well (not guaranteeing anything over here).

This is why it’s important for all of us to wear masks when out in public and while even using our own vehicles. If we spread the virus within our vehicle, by coughing say all over the steering wheel, and then our hands, and then the gas pump… You see where this goes.

We all know why it’s important to wear a facemask in order to protect ourselves. It filters the air we breathe in, reducing the particles and contaminants we’re exposed to as we breathe.

…the medical gloves we’re all leaving in parking lots.

As someone who worked in EMS, homecare and a hospital for 5+ years, if there’s anything that has been drilled to me it’s “scene safety, PPE.” So always make sure the scene is safe on arrival as an EMT.

I’m just going to the grocery store, the scene is likely safe. In this dynamic, however, you could think about which grocery store you’re using—is it the most popular one in town or the ethnic grocery store down the road that hardly anyone uses. Are you shopping at the most popular time and is the parking lot packed? Reducing exposure best happens by reducing your actual exposure to the virus — ie. how often you’re around other people in contained environments.

Now onto PPE. If I’m taking a trip to the grocery store, I might consider hand sanitizer at my door, hand sanitizer after I leave my car or after using a gas pump (and before touching my car), before/after leaving the store, before/after getting into my car, and before entering the house. This might seem excessive, but the idea is that you carry with you contaminants from one environment to the next and you want to stop that transfer from happening.

So you could use hand sanitizer at all of those intervals or you could wear gloves. The problem with wearing gloves is that you would have to change your gloves approximately 3–5 times if you stopped at a gas station. Gloves should always be disposed of in a proper trash can and should be removed properly to limit the transfer of contaminants.

If you’re just pulling them off, you’re still getting whatever is on the glove, all over your hands. Something I thought was rather silly but actually proved very sensible after watching a group of 30 EMT’s-in-training, was teaching others how to properly remove gloves to avoid spreading contaminants. It’s something everyone should learn and YouTube is filled with videos. You use one hand to pull the glove off the other—starting from the lip of the glove by your wrist, and rolling it over the rest of the glove towards your fingers.

With your exposed hand you do the same thing to the other hand—grab the end of the glove by the wrist and pull down, rolling over BOTH gloves to make a little inside out sack of dirty gloves —the clean side that was exposed to your hands on the outside of the sack. Toss it.

Something else to be mindful of with gloves is that there are a LOT of people in the US that are allergic to latex. Using hand sanitizer will accomplish the same goal and should be the PPE-route for hand safety that the average citizen leans on. If you feel you MUST use gloves — please grab a box of nitrile.

We all should be using PPE or some mindfulness around safety…

Every person can benefit from being more sanity and safe in these coming days. We’ve never been a particularly “clean” society— look at the germ counts on the average cell phone, just google “how germy is my phone” and prepare to have nightmares. Consider how you can extend some more of these habits in the longterm as it seems we weren’t particularly good at hand washing or cleaning our surfaces as a country before this started…