Avoid Spreadable Viruses with Proactive Tips

The Coronavirus has started a panic. Without a vaccine available currently, your family’s health merits concern. The first place to start is with the guidelines posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/actions-prevent-flu.htm. 

There are many common practices that expose you to germs without realizing it. Although you can’t live in a bubble to avoid germs, you can take simple-to-implement precautionary actions to lower your and your family’s risk.

Here are seven practices to decrease your family’s germ exposure all year long. 

1. Skip a crowded elevator. If the elevator contains a lot of people, stay out and get the next one. An elevator is a closed-in space with people breathing, sneezing, and/or coughing and there is no escape. Whether it’s high or low virus season, take an uncrowded elevator ride or for better health, take the stairs. If you need to take the elevator, use a tissue, the end of your sleeve, a glove, or as a last resort, your knuckle to hit the elevator button for service. 
2. Avoid restaurant pitfalls. Stay away from the middle tables in any restaurant or public place. Every time a new group is seated, they’re walking past you. Always request a table around the perimeter of the space anywhere you go. Better yet, ask for a table at the back of the restaurant. Use this tip in other public places, as well. In self-serve establishments, wipe the table with disinfectant before you get your food. Avoid buffets. Imagine how many people have touched the salad tongs, dressing ladles, and vegetable handles. With each hand on the serving utensils, they become a prime location for bacteria. If you can’t avoid a buffet because you’re at an event, use a napkin before touching a handle. If that is impossible, immediately wash your hands after hitting the buffet line and prior to enjoying your meal.
3. Think first at the gas pump. Grab disposable gloves or a paper towel before you enter your numbers on the pin pad or clutch the gas pump handle. Self-serve gas stations get a lot of business and the pin pad and pump handles are rarely cleaned or disinfected. Consider other places, such as grocery stores, retail outlets, and ATM terminals where you would use a pin pad.
4. Disinfect gym machines. Although it is standard procedure to always wipe down a machine after you use it, you’d be surprised by the number of people who don’t. Get in the habit of wiping down the machine before and after you use it.
5. Grab a napkin to fill your cup. Having a coffee meeting, lunch, or a mid-day break at your local coffee shop could be a frequent occurrence for you. Most often, you get your disposable cup or ceramic mug and fill it from the coffee urns and top it off with creamer. You touch your food, phone, or other belongings without thinking twice and now you’ve spread everyone else’s germs onto those items. Consider how many people use those coffee urns. The solution is simple. Don’t touch the coffee urn or creamer handles with your bare hands.
6. Use your pen. Keep a pen handy when you need to sign anything from a contract to your restaurant check. Those pesky germs are easily spread when you touch something that has been infected then touch your mouth, nose, or eyes. You touch your face an average of two dozen times an hour, and 44 percent of that touching involves contact with your eyes, nose or mouth, according to the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health study.
7. Reach for paper towels. Although restroom automated hand dryers are eco-friendly, paper towels are the most sanitary way to dry your hands reports the University of Connecticut and Quinnipiac University researchers. Air dryers have been associated with spreading germs because the dryers suck up bacterial splatter caused by the flushing of commodes without the lid closed in the restroom air.

One last healthy thought is to stay positive. Look at the sunny side of life. Wake up each day anticipating another healthy day. Research shows when you stay positive, you build your immune system.  

Mj Callaway is a two-time cancer survivor and the author of Bounce-Up™: Outpower Adversity, Boost Momentum, Rebound Higher