The World Health Organization recommends wearing a surgical mask—the type found in hospitals—if you feel ill or are caring for a sick person. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention go further and advise a cloth covering for anyone venturing into a crowded public place. Some people are exceeding those official guidelines and also wearing reusable or disposable gloves in public.
Experts warn, however, that misusing any of this protective gear could potentially expose you to just as many germs as you would contact without it—because the masks and gloves themselves collect viruses if they’re not cleaned or changed frequently, and because they may then contaminate your hands or things that you later touch without protection.
“When I see someone [wearing gloves] touching countertops and then digging in their purse, I think, Now they’ve created cross contamination and voided whatever protection they’re wearing,” says Jade Flinn, a nurse educator in the biocontainment unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
A standard laundry cycle is enough to wash the coronavirus off cloth, according to the WHO and CDC. “Because it’s an enveloped virus, it’s really susceptible to detergents,” says Rachel Graham, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The envelope that encapsulates viruses like influenza and SARS-CoV-2 is a delicate layer of oily lipids and proteins, held together by surface tension.
Laundry detergents and soaps contain surfactants, chemicals that easily break that envelope apart by reducing surface tension, explains Joshua Santarpia, a pathologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. A surfactant molecule has one end that’s attracted to oil and grease, while the other is attracted to water. The oil-loving end wedges into the coronavirus’s envelope, busting it apart. The remnants get trapped in circular pods of surfactant called micelles and are washed away in water. “The interaction of that surfactant with the viral envelope pretty quickly destroys the ability of that virus to be infective,” Santarpia says. Potent surfactants are found in most home and commercial cleaning products.