Hello, social distancing! Goodbye, handshakes

It started centuries ago as a symbol of peace, a gesture to prove you weren’t holding a weapon, and over time it became part of almost every social, religious, professional, business and sporting exchange. But the new coronavirus has forced a rethink of the handshake. No matter how friendly, it is an exchange of potentially infectious microorganisms.

Advertisement

“Hands are like a busy intersection, constantly connecting our microbiome to the microbiomes of other people, places, and things,” a group of scientistsaid.

Hands, they said, are the “critical vector” for transmitting microorganisms including viruses. But if it is no longer automatically acceptable, what will replace the handshake as a fixture of post-coronavirus social etiquette? A fist or elbow bump? Maybe a traditional Japanese bow or hat doff? How about Spock’s Vulcan salute from Star Trek? We are social beings. When we meet one another, we press flesh.

In the middle of the coronavirus it has become clear just how intimate such a gesture is. The human hand is fecund. We have hundreds of species of bacteria and viruses on our palms.

Our hands can carry Salmonella, E. coli, norovirus and respiratory infections like adenovirus and hand-foot-mouth disease. And, given how frequently

scientists find poop on our  palms, our hygiene habits are far less fastidious than we think.

BACTERIAL EFFERVESCENCE

We can’t see any of this with the naked eye. Charles Gerba, a microbiologist and public health researcher at the University of Arizona says he himself stopped shaking hands during the first SARS outbreak, in 2003. “I always say I have a cold,” he says. “That way I don’t have to shake their hand.”

“The handshake is what gets photographed at the time of any agreement,” says Dorothy Noyes, a professor of folklore at Ohio State University.  Awkward or smooth, handshakes are a hard habit to break, even if we want to. Reuters