Coronavirus: why you touch your face so much, and how to stop during a virus outbreak

We touch our faces more often than we think – one study caught medical students touching their faces 23 times per hour on average

Suggestions for limiting face contact include keeping your hands busy, using tools to scratch your face if you have an itch, and wearing gloves

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One of the ways a virus like the coronavirus can enter your body is through you touching your nose, mouth or eyes with contaminated hands. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 8:00pm, 9 Mar 2020Updated: 6:31am, 10 Mar 2020

We touch our faces all the time, but it is a real health risk. With the coronavirus outbreak as severe as it is, how do we stop?

In this new world, not only is nose picking thought to be gross, so is nose scratching, mouth touching and eye rubbing. All it takes is just one virus to hitch a ride on a contaminated finger and slip into the body through a nostril or a wet part of the face.

Then the virus can latch on, finding a human cell in the throat, nose or sinuses to hijack and destroy, flooding the body with even more copies of itself. In critical illnesses, that one careless touch from an unwashed finger can begin a process of destroying lungs and kidneys and, in a worst-case scenario, trigger septic shock, multiple organ failure and make it impossible to breathe on your own.

And yet, it is still so hard to stop touching our faces. Much of the time it is spontaneous, and we are not even aware of it. One study caught medical students in class touching their faces 23 times per hour on average. “It’s human nature to want to touch your face,” says Dr Otto Yang, an infectious diseases expert at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

All it takes is one virus to hitch a ride on a contaminated finger and slip into the body through a nostril or a wet part of the face. Photo: Getty Images

There’s a reason for that. Touching our faces may be related to negative feelings – a feeling when we have failed to achieve a goal or are not satisfied, according to a research article published in the journal PLoS One.

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