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Respiratory viruses like coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread when mucus or droplets containing the virus get into your body through your eyes, nose or throat. Often, the virus can easily spread from one person to the next via hands.
During a global pandemic, one of the cheapest, easiest, and most important ways to prevent the spread of a virus is to wash your hands frequently with soap and water.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to wash your hands the right way:
1. How do I wash my hands properly?
To eliminate all traces of the virus on your hands, a quick scrub and a rinse won’t cut it. Below is a step-by-step process for effective handwashing.
- Step 1: Wet hands with running water
- Step 2: Apply enough soap to cover wet hands
- Step 3: Scrub all surfaces of the hands – including back of hands, between fingers and under nails – for at least 20 seconds.
- Step 4: Rinse thoroughly with running water
- Step 5: Dry hands with a clean cloth or single-use towel
2. How long should I wash my hands for?
You should wash your hands for at least 20-30 seconds. An easy way to time it is by singing the full happy birthday song, twice.
The same goes for hand sanitizer: use a sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol and rub it into your hands for at least 20 seconds to ensure full coverage.
3. When should I wash my hands?
In the context of COVID-19 prevention, you should make sure to wash your hands at the following times:
- After blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing
- After visiting a public space, including public transportation, markets and places of worship
- After touching surfaces outside of the home, including money
- Before, during and after caring for a sick person
- Before and after eating
In general, you should always wash your hands at the following times:
- After using the toilet
- Before and after eating
- After handling garbage
- After touching animals and pets
- After changing babies’ diapers or helping children use the toilet
- When your hands are visibly dirty
4. How can I help my child wash his or her hands?
Here are some ways you can help children wash their hands by making handwashing easier and fun for them:
No, you can use any temperature of water to wash your hands. Cold water and warm water are equally effective at killing germs and viruses – as long as you use soap!
6. Do I need to dry my hands with a towel?
Germs spread more easily from wet skin than from dry skin, so drying your hands completely is an important step. Paper towels or clean cloths are the most effective way to remove germs without spreading them to other surfaces.
7. Which is better: washing your hands with soap and water or using hand sanitizer?
In general, both handwashing with soap and water and hand sanitizer, when practiced/used correctly, are highly effective at killing most germs and pathogens.
Soap kills the coronavirus by destroying the outer shell that protects it.
If your hands look dirty, you should wash them with soap and water. Hand sanitizer is less effective on visibly dirty hands. Hand sanitizer is often more convenient when you are outside of the home, but can be expensive or difficult to find in emergency contexts. Also, alcohol-based hand sanitizer kills the coronavirus, but it does not kill all kinds of bacteria and viruses, for example, the norovirus and rotavirus which cause diarrhea. It can also be toxic if swallowed and it should be stored out of reach of children and used only under adult supervision.
8. What if I don’t have soap?
In the absence of soap and running water, using hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 per cent alcohol is the best second option. Using soapy water or ash may help remove bacteria, though not as effectively. If these methods are used, it is important to wash your hands as soon as possible when you do have access to handwashing facilities, and avoid contact with people and surfaces in the meantime.
9. How else can I help stop the spread of the coronavirus?
- Practice physical distancing: stay at least one metre (three feet) apart from others, air rooms frequently or leave the windows open, avoiding shaking hands, hugging or kissing people, sharing food, utensils, cups and towels
- Wear a mask whenever you are unable to maintain physical distance, especially indoors
- Stay home if you feel unwell and avoid close contact with anyone who has cold or flu-like symptoms; seek medical care early if you or your child has a fever, cough or difficulty breathing
- Use proper sneezing and coughing etiquette: cover your mouth and nose with a flexed elbow or tissue when coughing or sneezing; dispose of used tissues immediately and wash your hands
- Avoid touching your face (mouth, nose, eyes)
- Clean surfaces that might have come in touch with the virus, and generally clean surfaces more frequently (especially in public spaces)
- Stay up to date with the latest information from your local health authorities or through the WHO website
For all of UNICEF’s guidance on COVID-19, click here.
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This article was originally published on 13 March, 2020. It was last reviewed on 5 October, 2021.
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Soap and water is more effective than hand sanitizer. Alexander Raths/Shutterstock
Hand-washing takes less than half a minute, yet an estimated 97% of people do it wrong. That's a big problem since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that one of the most effective ways to protect yourself from the coronavirus is to wash your hands regularly. Here's a step-by-step guide for how to wash your hands to protect yourself from getting sick.
How to wash your hands
Washing your hands the right way isn't hard, but it may involve more steps than you're currently doing. Here's a 5-step guide, directly from the CDC, for how to wash your hands correctly:
- First, wet your hands with running water. Turn off the faucet once you're done wetting to conserve water.
- Apply the soap and rub it between your hands to produce a nice, thick lather. Apply the lather to the back and side of your hands, as well as in between the fingers, and especially under the fingernails.
- Continue applying the lather and scrubbing your hands for at least 20 seconds. Don't rinse for much longer than that.
- Rinse the lather off with clean, running water.
- Last but not least, dry your hands with either an air drier or a clean towel.
Your hands are a petri dish for germs, so it's important to wash them regularly to protect yourself from infectious diseases like the coronavirus. To protect yourself from the coronavirus, specifically, the CDC says to wash after going to the bathroom, blowing your nose, sneezing, or coughing. You should also wash your hands before eating anything.
Other times you should wash your hands include:
- After taking out the garbage.
- After handling dirty diapers or animal poop.
- Before, during, after food preparation.
- Before and after caring for a sick person.
- For a complete list, visit the CDC's website on how and when to wash your hands.
"It's recommended that you wash your hands for the amount of time it takes to sing 'Happy Birthday' twice — about 20 seconds," says family physician Dr. Sarah Borwein, MD. "Twenty seconds has been shown to be the minimum amount of time it takes to really remove germs."
If you don't wash long enough, even with soap, it could backfire. "Chances are that you are not effectively removing all the disease-causing germs that are lurking on them," Borwein tells Insider.
On the flip side, washing for too long can cause more problems, especially if you are using harsh soap. "It can result in skin that is dry, cracked or even bleeds," Borwein says. "This interrupts the barrier protective function of the skin and allows germs to enter the body."
A common misconception is that hot water is best to clean your hands.
"Many people believe that hotter water is better, but in fact, for the purposes of removing germs, there is no good evidence that water temperature matters," Borwein says. "Using hot water can dry the hands out and lead to skin damage, so the recommendation is to use cold or warm water."
As for the best method to effectively wash your hands, Borwein encourages rubbing your hands together "vigorously", and covering all surfaces: the back of the hands, wrists, between the fingers, and under fingernails where grime gets stuck.
Plus, if you actually scrub all the right surfaces, hitting that 20-second mark should be easy.
There are no added benefits to using anti-bacterial soap versus the plain kind, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In fact, Borwein warns that it's not even equally effective as an old-fashioned hand washing.
"Soap and water is actually the best way to remove germs from the hands. Hand sanitizer is a good alternative when soap and water is not readily available, or in some situations like hospitals and clinics, where you have to wash your hands a great many times per day and sometimes that isn't realistic."
Unlike washing hands with soap and water, sanitizer doesn't remove all harmful germs on your hands. "For example, Norovirus [which causes vomiting and diarrhea] is not effectively killed by hand sanitizer," Borwein tells Insider.
Plus, sanitizer won't work as effectively on visibly filthy hands because it won't remove dirt as easily. So make sure to always wash after doing dirty work like taking out the trash, outdoor activities, or handling greasy items.
"If using alcohol sanitizer, it should contain at least 60% alcohol," Borwein says. "And you should use enough — don't be stingy with it. A rough size guide is a dime-size amount."