Things to do while you have to stay at home. Take care of your skin! Start with your hands.
Quarantine was a name for a 40 day isolation time when an infectious illness lasted 40 days, but the necessary isolation time varies. With cooronavirus it starts with two weeks but depending on the development of this pandemic it could take much longer. Humans have been through pandemics before, many times, and people survived.
Things are better this time because we have science and evidence based medicine (no bleeding, cupping or leeching in modern America). Let’s keep it together and don’t listen to the agents of chaos. In the meantime, the virus has been sequenced, a protease crucial for its assembly has been crystallized and thousands of scientists are working towards antiviral chemicals and vaccines. So we can do our part in slowing down the pandemic by staying at home and washing our hands to prevent contagion.
Are your hands painfully dry and cracked because you’ve been following the advice to frequently wash them or apply hand sanitizer to prevent the spread of the coronavirus?
1. You may be more reluctant to wash hands carefully and thoroughly, although hand washing is one of the important ways to stop contagion.
2. Cracked skin is more susceptible to infection. It is true that coronavirus tends to enter through the respiratory system, but there are bacteria waiting to enter through broken skin.
What to do?
Keep your hands clean and moisturize them. Moisturizing hands is part of good skin hygiene. What do you need?
An emollient cream. You can improve the emolliency of any cream by adding petrolatum to it. Apply the cream after washing to lock in the moisture.
Just as I was writing this post, I became aware that the skin of my hands was uncomfortable tight. I keep a big bottle with cream on my desk. The trick is to have the cream or lotion nearby so you don’t have to go and find it!
If you get out of your house in your car, I carry baby wipes with me to clean hands as I go, after I touch the world outside the car. Shopping goes in the trunk so that my seat stays clean.
Don’t share your hand cream with anybody, just as you shouldn’t share other lotions or cosmetics.
Wash your hands frequently, especially after going to the bathroom, before eating and after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing. You should spend 20 seconds at the sink and make sure to lather up the parts of the hands that are often overlooked — the backs, between the fingers, the thumbs and under the nails. These days, try to trim your nails short. After washing, you should dry your hands thoroughly. If these were ordinary days I would tell you that if your hands are cracked then you are washing them too frequently. These days, I would tell you to add a bit more petrolatum to the hand lotion.
If you have to be out there working, if you are a health care worker or a supermarket cashier, or a delivery driver, thank you for your service. And keep your hands clean, moisturized and don’t share the lotion!