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.
“It’s human nature to want to touch your face,” said Dr. Otto Yang, an infectious diseases expert at UCLA.
There’s a reason for that.
Touching our faces may actually be related to negative feelings — a feeling when we’ve failed to achieve a goal or aren’t satisfied, according to a research article published in the journal PLoS One.
Face touching can help us deal with anxiety and discomfort, and may be comforting, the report said. We might think we want to touch our faces because of a perceived itch or to groom ourselves, but research suggests we’re actually doing it because we’re somehow uneasy or unsettled, according to research described in the study.
Touching our faces is also thought to be a way we might try to avoid being distracted. In a study of face touching, researchers concocted ways of trying to distract study participants during a difficult mental task, and found that the human test subjects increasingly touched their faces when their attention was distracted and they needed to refocus.
Unfortunately, the things we touch the most often can often be filthy. Such as our beloved smartphones. Which we probably touch as soon as we wash our hands.
Colonies of bacteria were discovered on the vast majority of health care workers’ cellphones in one study; 93% of the phones studied were found to be crawling with germs. Most non-health care workers’ phones were also dirty, with 58% of them home to microbes, said the study, published in the Iranian Journal of Microbiology.
“Mobile phones are not only capable of transferring messages but also are disease-producing microbes,” the study said.
While many people fear being sneezed or coughed on, there’s plenty of convincing evidence that shows just how easy it is for a virus to enter through face touching.
Some viruses can survive for days on hard surfaces, just waiting to be picked up by a new fingertip. One study in the Journal of Hospital Infection found flu virus persisting on hard surfaces in flu patients’ hospital rooms. The virus was found on a computer mouse, bed rail, wall, sofa and clothes. (In one case, the virus survived on a surface even after the room was cleaned and left empty for 72 hours before it was tested.)
Viruses are also common in daycare centers. One study found more than half of tested surfaces were contaminated with flu virus; another said “respiratory viruses were omnipresent … especially on the toys.”
