How to Wash Your Hands

You’ve probably been washing your hands obsessively recently.  But unless you’ve worked in the medical field or a research lab setting, and therefore learned surgical hand-washing technique, odds are good you’ve been missing a ton of (virus-harboring) spots.

This simple, brilliant demo drives that point home.  Watch it, practice washing correctly a few times, then watch it again to make sure the details all sunk in:

 

[And, as a few people have asked of late, some of the other things I’ve been doing to stay (overly) safe:

  • Staying inside completely, aside from a daily walk with Jess during a quiet time of day, along relatively deserted routes, and giving people 20+ feet of leeway along the way.
  • Skipping delivery, and cooking our own food instead.
  • Buying groceries, toiletries, and everything else online only.
  • On the rare occasion I do need to head out for errands / to do laundry in our building  / etc., wearing a disposable latex glove on my right hand. I use that hand to touch anything other people have touched (laundry machine, credit card pin pad, etc.), and use the other to touch anything of my own (the clean laundry, my phone, etc.)
  • Showering as soon as I get back home, along with wiping down my phone, and washing my glasses.
  • Letting all packages, and non-perishable groceries, sit for at least 48 hours in a staging area by our door before bringing them into the rest of our apartment.
  • For perishable groceries, Lysol-wiping packages thoroughly before putting them in the freezer or refrigerator.  
  • For unpackaged produce, putting it in the sink, squirting in some dish soap, and then filling up the sink and agitating in the suds.  Then draining, and refilling and draining twice more with clean water to rinse.
  • Buying a pulse oximeter on Amazon, in case we do get sick.  (On the idea that the only two reasons to head to ER would be a substantially spiked fever [>103°] or a drop in O2Sat (<88%); self-testing would let us know if it was no longer wise to just quarantine, hydrate, and wait it out.)
  • Similarly, practicing listening to each other’s chests when we breathe, to get a baseline for normal lung function to compare against when listening for crackling / bubbling / rumbling during breathing, the symptoms of pneumonia.
  • Stocking some hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, in case trials pan out, but inventory doesn’t keep pace with demand.

I’ll add to the list as more of my OCD virus-phobic practices come come to mind.  Though, if you have similarly nuts ones you’re engaging in, I’d love hear about them.]

March 22, 2020

Busy Quarantine

My father once told me he’d learned over time that to-do lists are kind of like the tides: sometimes it’s high tide, and sometimes it’s low tide, but he’d always been trying to reach no water, and he’d eventually realized that just wasn’t going to happen.

I’ve been thinking about that of late, whenever I see various ‘things to do during self-isolation’ lists getting emailed around, or people complaining on Twitter about being bored out of their minds.  Because, on my end, even having cleared my schedule of every outside-the-apartment appointment and obligation, I’m still making it to the end of each day feeling totally behind on everything I could and should be doing.

That said, I’ve also been extremely productive.  I just have so much more that I want to get done.  And that doesn’t even include the less urgent and obligated stuff, like catching up on the pile of books I’m hoping to read, or the list of movies I’d like to watch, or just taking some time to stare out the window and reflect on the big picture of life.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I still don’t really have a fixed schedule.  I’m hoping to get that figured out shortly, adding a more formal start and end to my workday, making sure I observe an actual weekend.  Anything that adds some regularity and contour to my self-isolated life.  This whole thing could stretch on for quite a while, and as much as I’d like to come out the other end with a list of accomplishments, I’m even more concerned about getting there with my sanity still intact.

March 19, 2020

Papered

Despite my prior hesitancy, I did, in fact, head out for a run yesterday.  And, at about two in the afternoon, the streets of New York were still surprisingly busy.  Though I was able to steer clear of anyone I saw by a margin of at least 15 feet, I ran past our local Trader Joe’s, where dozens of people were queued up outside, sandwiched together, waiting to enter a store I assume was even more densely packed inside.  We’re not exactly crushing this whole social distancing thing, apparently.

Then, late in the evening, when foot traffic had all but disappeared, Jess and I headed out together, walking down to a deserted Riverside Park.  Along the way, we crossed the street (or re-routed entirely) a few times, to avoid the rare handfuls of people (mostly in their teens and twenties) whom we did see.  As we both agreed, we’d never felt more like characters in a post-apocalyptic thriller.

Back home, we re-inventoried our food and supplies, and placed an Amazon order for the last few things we’d need (aside from, ideally, perishable food items nabbed on weekly grocery runs) to survive two months of lockdown.  Once those packages arrive, we should be good to go on everything.  Or, at least, everything but toilet paper.

As a result, I was up past midnight, Googling around, scouring outside-the-box options for some still-stocked Charmin.  But, despite my best efforts, all I found were gougingly-priced listings on eBay, and I’d sooner rinse my ass in the shower, bidet-style, each time I poop than pay $150 for a dozen rolls.

So, this morning, I headed out again, to see if I could find TP in any of the brick-and-mortar stores nearby.  Doing my best to give everyone wide berths, and wearing a single latex glove on my left hand (like an immunocompromised Michael Jackson) for anything I needed to touch (and using my phone solely with my clean, ungloved, and otherwise mostly pocketed right hand), I headed into nearly a dozen spots – grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, bodegas.  And, in all of them, bupkis.

Fortunately, we’re still about a week and change from running out our current supply.  And I’m hoping the reporting – that we’re not facing an overall toilet paper inventory shortage, just distribution difficulties in getting it out quickly enough to keep up with spiked demand – means things should look less dire in a few days.

In the meantime, Jess has suggested we simply stop eating, which would eliminate both toilet paper and grocery restock concerns.  Which, indeed, has a sort of logic to it.  This is a tough time to be full of shit.

 

March 18, 2020