Editor:
All the experts tell us to “wash your hands.” But I have not heard a clear explanation as to, shall we call it, the chemistry behind washing your hands.
I asked 20 random strangers why we should wash our hands frequently. Most people were vague about it. “It keeps your hands sterile.” “It keeps your hands clean.”
It turns out that the coronavirus is surrounded by a layer of fat. A good mixture of soapy water and vigorous hand washing dissolves the layer of fat and the virus is neutralized.
As Prof. Pall Thordarson of the University of New South Wales in Sydney,
Australia explains: “You can’t, even for a million dollars, get a drug for the
coronavirus – but your grandmother’s bar of soap kills the virus.”
Any bar of soap will do the trick. You need to work up a good lather.
I wash my hands to two verses of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” many times a day.
I am an old man, in my 80s, and I do not wish to die from the coronavirus.
Bring on the vaccine, but keep washing those hands.
Francis Brown, Gibsons
