After a year of obsessive 20-second hand-washings every time slotxo ใหม่ล่าสุด I touched something from outside my home, I think I should have stocked up on hand cream, not toilet paper, at the start of the pandemic. It was certainly not a good time for CVS to discontinue my favourite product, Healthy Hands lotion, which could have kept my skin from resembling sandpaper these many months.

Nonetheless, I don’t regret this habit that, along with consistent mask-wearing and social distancing, helped me remain hale and hearty while waves of COVID-19 ravaged New York City. Not only did I stay free of the coronavirus, I never even got a sniffle despite daily outdoor exercise and dog walks and a stubborn refusal to let others do my grocery shopping.

Now, with many people seeming to have caught a cold in recent weeks as we get back into the world and drop our guard, it’s a good reminder that we shouldn’t drop the hand-washing habits we learned during the pandemic.

On average, our hands come into contact with many hundreds of surfaces a day, exposing them to hundreds of thousands of microorganisms. Fortunately, most are innocuous. Still, given that we touch our faces about 16 or more times an hour, without proper hand hygiene, we risk the chance of introducing a not-so-harmless infectious organism, including the Delta variant of the coronavirus, into our mouths, noses or eyes.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and just about every public health specialist emphasised repeatedly that hand-washing with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, or using an alcohol-based hand sanitiser when soap and water are unavailable, is the first line of defence against the spread of COVID-19.