Hey, remember that couple of weeks back at the start of the pandemic where everybody was going crazy trying not to touch their faces? It occurred to me today that this supposedly essential piece of public health advice has long since fallen clean out of most people’s minds. At any rate it is a little jarring, at this juncture, to hear it mentioned.
As a person with a panoply of nervous habits, I never paid it the slightest attention myself. The first time I heard “Don’t touch your face!”, I did a sort of intuitive calculation. To save my life I was being asked never to touch my face without freshly-washed hands — hands that would then have to be washed again if I screwed up, and every bit as often as I screwed up. But to follow the recommendation I would have to have consciously notice every time I touched my face.
Which absolutely wasn’t going to happen. So if that was what it was going to take, I was toast.
So far, still here. What happened instead of me dying (though, obviously, let’s check back in 2021) was that the emphasis was taken off of face-touching in favour of what the public-health establishment seems to have quietly decided are more important strategies. Social distancing, reduced excursions, handwashing, and, slowly but surely, mask-wearing.
In principle, if you can manage not to touch your face, it will prevent you from spreading virus fomites from your hands to your respiratory tract and from your respiratory tract to your hands. (Every time you wash your hands properly, it breaks this chain, or at least the hands-to-face one, and you get a fresh start.) This is why surgeons and health-care workers put a premium on avoidance of face-touching for the duration of a surgery or a work shift — with their colleagues watching them.
There have been plenty of experiments in health-care settings showing that face-touching does spread viral particles around in foreseeable ways. But the initial strong warnings against face-touching were a hint of what is now obvious: that public-health officials were turning poorly tailored clinical evidence into universal recommendations in a haphazard way.
There is no evidence I am aware of that anybody can observe surgeon-like discipline about face-touching for any great length of time. There have been intelligent efforts devoted to measuring the effect of the major anti-COVID recommendations, and researchers are fairly certain that masks work to reduce community spread, but advice against face-touching has been left out of this game. There is no obvious means of measuring compliance on a social scale even approximately. In my view, it is a bit ludicrous to imagine that anyone could avoid touching his face for months on end, but I’m sure there are some champions out there who will insist that it is possible. Feel free to touch your germy, breathed-on computer keyboard, though not your face, and send me an email or a tweet about it. Denounce me as the inveterate chin-scratcher and eyebrow-stroker I am.
It was apparent pretty early on that the pandemic wasn’t going to wash over us in a manner of days. The doctors couldn’t know how serious we would get (for a while) about social distancing: maybe the face thing was part of a desperate belt-and-braces approach. At this point in the pandemic it looks like one of those odd behavioural curios that may not survive long enough to set into the long-term cultural memory.
National Post
• Twitter: ColbyCosh
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
