Letter: You would need to change gloves often
A reader believes multiple changes of gloves are needed to stop the virus spreading.
So W F Kerswell (Letters, May 16) thinks wearing gloves is going to stop virus spreading? As a lot of clinicians have pointed out the virus can survive on gloves much longer than on your skin, because the oils in your skin are to protect you from bacteria and virus by destroying their outer envelope.
To help halt the spread of virus you would have to change your gloves every time you handled or touched something before you handled anything else. The reason hospitals get through so much PPE is that staff change masks and gloves after dealing with every patient.
On the other hand I have noticed a lot of discarded gloves blowing around supermarket car parks or just left in trollies for others to deal with. And many wear the same mask day after day – allowing virus to build up, a lot of them are masks made for people doing DIY, mainly for dust or fibres. To give you an idea how small a virus is, you can get 100 bacteria in the width of a human hair. Across the same hair you can get 1,000 virus.
Chris Smith, Horsehay
