Coronavirus laundry rules: tips on when and how to wash your clothes to avoid contamination

The coronavirus can survive for hours on various surfaces including your clothing, so your laundry is an important part of your hygiene

Experts offer tips on how often to wash, how hot the water should be and how to handle dirty clothes

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Washing your clothes is an important part of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:00am, 2 Apr 2020Updated: 4:50pm, 2 Apr 2020

Personal hygiene may have improved since the emergence of the coronavirus, but can the same be said for our laundry habits? Recent research indicates that the Covid-19 virus can survive on various surfaces, including garments, for long periods ranging from hours to days. This has led to much confusion when it comes to cleaning clothing.

“Practising good hygiene and cleaning clothes after each use is critical to stop transmission of viruses from garments to people.

To our understanding unlike solid surfaces that can be wiped, a garment has many layers of fibres and therefore just cleaning the “surface” is certainly not enough.

The garment needs to be in an immersive cleaning process such as wet wash with detergent or dry-cleaning process,” says Ryan Merszei, general manager of Jeeves, a laundry cleaning service in Hong Kong.

As a rule, if you’ve worn a piece of clothing outside the house or in crowded areas, it’s best to wash it sooner rather than later. The same applies for clothing that may have come into contact with hard surfaces, where the virus has been proven to survive for a longer time.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed how we wash our clothes. Photo: Shutterstock

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises “using the warmest appropriate water setting” – the NHS in the UK suggests between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius (104 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit) – along with a good quality detergent.