Yahoo Lifestyle 
Why Wearing Gloves To The Grocery Store Won't Protect You From COVID-19
As you walk around the supermarket, you may notice some of your fellow shoppers are wearing rubber gloves. One woman picks up a box of cereal, puts it back, touches her face with her gloved hand and tucks her hair behind her ear. She then pulls out her phone to consult her shopping list.
Given what we know about how COVID-19 spreads – predominantly through droplets expelled in the air, but also through touching infected surfaces – if someone with the virus on their hands had already touched that cereal box, the woman may have transferred it to her gloves, her face and her phone.
It’s understandable that people are keen to protect themselves against coronavirus, but one expert in hygiene wants us to know that wearing gloves isn’t the best way to go about it – in fact, it might do more harm than good.
“What good are gloves going to do?” asks Professor Sally Bloomfield, honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Whilst you’re walking around the supermarket, you could easily touch your nose, mouth and eyes with gloved hands. The only reason it might help is if you remember you have gloves on and think: ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t touch my face’.
“I don’t understand why we’re wearing gloves,” she continues. “I think people think that masks and gloves go together, because that’s PPE [personal protective equipment], and in hospitals people wear masks and gloves, so outside if you’re going to wear a mask, you’re going to wear gloves.”
The reality is that in hospitals, staff may be coming into close contact with patients who are very ill and they may also be taking care of bodily fluids, but are trained to use the gloves properly. That includes taking them off safely – you have to reach inside each glove and peel it inside out without touching the outside – before disposing of them.
For the general public, this doesn’t make sense. Gloves are just “an extension of our hands”, says Prof...
