Nurse shows how even when you wear gloves, coronavirus cross-contamination happens



SAGINAW, Mich. -- Molly Lixley understands fear over the coronavirus pandemic has people taking extra precautions, but there’s a science to doing so properly, and she wants people to follow it.

Fed up with what she deemed to be improper glove use and disposal, the Michigan nurse made a video of herself using paint to demonstrate how easily cross-contamination happens at grocery stores.

Lixley put on gloves and dipped her fingers in a plate of paint, which represented germs on an item she’d picked up at the store.

Her fingers now stained, she mimicked sending a text on her phone, answering a call and scratching her nose. Those seemingly harmless actions left her hands, face and phone covered with germs, despite wearing gloves.

“There’s no point in wearing gloves if you’re not going to wash your hands every time you touch something,” Lixley stressed. “There’s no point, friends.”

Lixley, who has years of emergency room nursing experience, also scolded people who leave their used gloves in parking lots.

She showed how to properly take them off — a method which leaves the contaminated surfaces wrapped inside of the gloves --  then stressed to throw them away.

“You take them off appropriately, and they belong in the trash,” Lixley said. "In the trashcan, people.”

With more than 15,700, Michigan has the third-highest number of coronavirus cases in the United States. More than 600 in the state have died from COVID-19, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.