Hi, everyone, I'm Abby Carlson.
I'm an infectious diseases doctor
here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
And welcome, or welcome back,
to our Project Firstline Video Series, Inside Infection Control.
We've been talking in this series a lot about viruses,
specifically SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
We've also talked about how viruses work and how they spread.
And today we're going to focus on that last part,
how viruses and other germs that make us sick spread.
We know that we get sick with COVID-19
when the virus SARS-CoV-2 gets into our nose, mouth and eyes.
But other than breathing it in,
how else can the virus get to those places?
Well, quite simply, on your hands.
When you touch something that has live virus on it
and then you touch your face without cleaning your hands first,
you can get virus into your eyes, your nose, and your mouth.
And so, then the question comes, what things have virus on them?
Well, more than you might think.
And to understand why, let's go back to those respiratory droplets.
We talked in an earlier episode about how these droplets have a lot of different sizes.
And when they're breathed out,
some of the very tiny ones are going to be caught in the air
and carried away, traveling wherever the air currents are going.
But a lot of those droplets are big enough -- still small --
but big enough that they won't travel very far in the air.
Instead, they'll start falling towards the ground.
You can think of it a little bit like leaves on a tree.
A lot of the leaves are going to fall near the tree.
But some of them will be caught by the wind,
and they'll move with the direction of the wind, they'll fall a little further away.
Let's take that image a step further.
Leaves falling from a tree don't just fall to the ground, either.
They also fall on your car, the roof of your house, anything that's nearby.
Just like that, droplets, respiratory droplets, they fall on things that are nearby,
like patient beds and waiting room chairs, desks, clothes.
The list is very long.
Once the droplets land on something, the virus can survive for at least a little while.
It's not long for most surfaces,
but it's long enough for you to touch that surface
and for the virus to make it onto your hands.
From there, the virus can get into your body if you touch your face
without cleaning your hands first.
And that happens.
You're exhausted at the end of your shift and you rub your eyes,
or you're running from place to place and you forget to clean your hands.
It's one of those habits that's just hard to recognize and hard to break.
In addition to droplets falling down,
another important way that virus can get onto surfaces
is when an infected person touches their eyes, their nose, their mouth,
which gets virus onto their hands,
and then they touch another surface, like the break room door handle,
or the keyboard in the nurses station, an elevator button, an IV pull.
Again, this list goes on and on.
And these, these actions, they leave the virus on that surface
that someone else can pick up on their hands.
And it's gross to say --
but for any of us who have been in healthcare,
we know that the body fluids that we have, including spit and snot,
can get onto things like linens and things near a patient.
And if anyone touches those surfaces and doesn't clean their hands,
they can spread virus around that way,
from themselves, to other surfaces, to other people.
Knowing all of this, we can see why good hand hygiene
and good cleaning of the environment are so important for infection control,
so that viruses and other germs that make us sick don't spread.
We're going to talk a lot more about this in other videos because it's a big topic
that applies to many diseases, not just COVID-19.
In the meantime, thank you for joining us.
As always, please don't hesitate to follow up on Facebook or Twitter,
or check us out online at CDC.gov/ProjectFirstline
We'll see you all at the next episode.