A large pet peeve of mine is seeing the general public use surgical gloves incorrectly as a means of infection control and protection. I most commonly see gloves being worn by grocery checkout attendants and by law enforcement. Gloves offer little direct protection from day to day interactions and provide a false sense of security that prevents the wearer from performing hand hygiene as frequently as they should.

In order to protect oneself and prevent the spread of infection, an individual needs to clean their hands between each interaction with a new individual. The typical use of gloves by non-medical individuals involves continuing to wear the same gloves for hours or even days at a time. Every time the wearer touches a new surface, object, or person, their gloves pick up whatever was there; when they touch the next surface, object, or person with those gloves, they transfer it and facilitate the spread of disease.

In addition to spreading the disease to others, most people subconsciously touch their clothing and face constantly throughout the day and since they have interacted with hundreds of people with their gloves, its like hundreds of people have touched them.

When I care for a patient in the operating room I use hand sanitizer, don gloves, interact with my patient or dirty equipment, remove my gloves, then use hand sanitizer again before I can interact with a clean environment again. Although we seem pretentious when we do it, we should constantly be reminding the people that wear gloves in public, to change their practice. Grocery workers and law enforcement such as the TSA are facilitating the spread of disease to countless people every day though ignorance of basic hand hygiene techniques.

Here’s a video I made addressing similar concerns over every day, seeing dozens of people wearing surgical gloves in public during the COVID-19 crisis: