Fist-bumps might not keep coronavirus at bay

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I had a disturbing encounter with a senior government official the other day, during which he coughed into his hand a couple of times, assuring me he was over the chest infection that caused it.

To my shame, I shook the same hand at the end of the meeting; I was more concerned about offending him than contracting coronavirus or any other bug.

But the episode took me back to a year ago when I phoned a media contact at the NSW health department and suggested they should discourage older people from shaking hands during flu season.

“Run a campaign called ‘fist-bump for flu season’,” I said.  “Older Australians are less likely to fist-bump rather than shake hands, and more likely to die from the flu.” The woman I was talking to laughed out loud. “You run the campaign, if you want,’ she said.

Are they still laughing or is that coughing? Last week NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard advised the public to forgo handshakes for “a pat on the back”.

At least they’re not as bad as the American health official who licked her finger while explaining why we should stop touching our faces.

Now, the medical jury is out on whether fist-bumps will make you less likely to contract flu, colds or any other virus.

It’s not a question of whether fist-bumping passes on fewer microbes than a handshake – it definitely does – it’s whether a handshake passes on that many infections to begin with.

Coronavirus is transferred by droplets from coughs and sneezes, experts tell us.  What they don’t tell us is how long the virus survives from another person’s cough to their hand, to your hand, to your face.

If you want defitive advice on how the virus spreads and how to avoid it, this government website pretty much nails it. Oh, and wearing a facemask won’t do much to protect you. But if you have the virus, it will help to protect others.

Medics are telling us not to touch our mouths or noses if we can avoid it. And you wouldn’t believe how often you touch your face or its component parts during the average day.

So what has this to do with living in strata?

Australians, especially older ones, tend to shake hands on every meeting and you meet a lot more people in a unit block than you do in your house.

Say you come back to your apartment block from a cruise to South Korea or Northern Italy, and your neighbour greets you with a firm handshake, asking where you’ve been.

‘Oh, I’ve been on a cruise to a coronavirus hotspot,’ you reply.  ‘Now I’m self-quarantining.’

Oops. Pass the hand sanitizer.

But seriously, what do you do when you are self-quarantined in an apartment block?

How diligent would you be in maintaining your isolation? Might you sneak down to the gym, just to prove to yourself that you were fit and well?

Would you carry a pack of wipes to disinfect any handrails you might grab in case you got the low-sugar wobbles because you ran out of food?

And when you left your flat to dump the garbage, what would happen if you bumped into a friendly neighbour? That extended hand must be shaken. There are a lot of cruise-loving retirees in apartment blocks.  And not only are older people at greater risk from Coronavirus and flu, they are much less likely to fist-bump than shake hands.

To be fair, hand-shaking is probably not the most dangerous greeting.  Europeans just can’t stop kissing each other.

Twice on alternate cheeks in France and Italy is bad enough. But three times in Russia, Holland, Switzerland, Poland, the Balkans and Lebanon is a peck too far.

That said, you have to worry about the nose-to-nose Maori hongi. And would things be worse in Japan if they didn’t prefer bowing to physical contact?

Iran has banned handshakes, and replaced them with foot-tapping. Meanwhile Americans are touching elbows.  But those actions bring you too close to potential virus carriers’ cogh and sneeze zone for my comfort.

A pat on the back is fine, but a fist-bump keeps the infected at arm’s length.

LATEST ADVICE – Stay well apart

It seems that now fist-bumping isn’t such a crash-hot idea either as we are being advised to stay well away from each other (unless we are footballers).

By the way, the Health Department advises self-isolating apartment residents to wear a face mask when they are passing through or to common property, and not to use the gym, swimming pool or other common facilities.

A couple of large apartment blocks in Sydney have closed their gyms and swimming pools simply because they can’t be certain what the risk factor might be.

A version of this column first appeared in the Australian Financial Review.

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One Reply to “Fist-bumps might not keep coronavirus at bay”

  1. Jimmy-T says:

    This is now being discussed in the Flat Chat Forum

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