Is it a bit OTT to disinfect your shopping when you get it home?

[Bunnylady54]

I keep seeing posts on Facebook about doing this & tbh it wouldn’t have occurred to me at all. I keep as safe as I can when I shop but not sure it’s necessary to spray what you take home. Also saw something about washing coats etc when you’ve been for a walk.

Yes, every thing that comes into the house either goes into the spare room for 9 days or washed/wiped/sprayed as appropriate.

I don’t give a flying what anyone thinks, they’re not going to be able to magic up a ventilator when I need one. I’m 51,diabetic,over weight&have high blood pressure-I’m not kidding myself I’m going to be top of the list for ventilation.

I’m hoping to avoid getting it until there’s treatment/enough ventilators & I’ll do everything I can to prevent it- I don’t care what anyone thinks 🤷🏻‍♀️

I admit I hadn't been cleaning the food (I haven't bought any since last Friday and before then it was a good 10 days before then) but I do stick to the same bags for life, antibac my hands regularly when out, strip as soon as I get in and put the clothes straight in the washer so they're not laying around. I then, wash my hands and then put the shopping away, wash my hands again and wipe down everywhere the bags may have been/mop the floor then shower and put clean clothes/pyjamas on before sitting on the settee or tending to my mum.

I'm also not buying anything 'loose' because I had to call into our local market on Friday to get something the supermarket didn't have and the amount of children with their parents that were touching the loose fruit/veg or coughing over it at perfect stall height made my feel ill. I'm sorry for the extra plastic but as someone with 2 underlying health conditions myself as well as being a 24/7 live in carer for a relative I don't want the extra risk!

No,I haven’t been cleaning the food. I’m just making sure I wash my hands more frequently.

Ive started doing the same thing, it can live up to 9 whole days on certain surfaces and just think of hwi many people have touched the items before you. Im dowsing a cloth in dettol and wiping every parcel or food item that comes into my home with it. And then washing my hands after

@chipsandgin Where is that actually from?

A bit OTT? Nah, its a LOT OTT
I couldnt live with that kind of paranoia. As it is the general news cycle of corona is doing my head in, so much so, ive stopped watching the news

if gloves are useless why are all the shop staff wearing them at th till

www.itv.com/news/2020-03-24/how-safe-is-your-food-the-packaging-and-your-home-deliveries/

This has some common sense advice in it

Cohle

You do understand that dettol anti bac spray has NOT yet been tested on the Covid19 strain right?

People including me rushed to buy it because it says 'proven to kill human coronavirus' because its has been tested against SARS and MERS strains of coronavirus.

And can we explain where advice is from, please? Posting screenshots with no source and just full of emojis and saying 'this is the advice' isn't really good practice. Advice should come from proper sources like the NHS (and if that screenshot is from them then maybe add an attribution!), not from random FB posts where someone has done a scenic tour of the emoji keyboard. The advice could well be legit, but the source is vital.

Yes adipose, it has not been tested on covid 19. But you said it has been confirmed as not being effective against it - that is not true.

HarrietThePi
Yes adipose, it has not been tested on covid 19. But you said it has been confirmed as not being effective against it - that is not true.

I wrote:

adiposegirl2 until t was mentioned to me on here and I comfirmed that it doesn't kill Covid 19 strain.

A PP linked to Dettol site that states-

Definitive scientific confirmation of this, as with all other commercially available virucides, can only be provided once testing against COVID-19 Coronavirus has been conducted, following release of the strain by relevant health authorities.^"

I stand by what I wrote.

*I wash everything that comes through the door in a bleach solution.

If l go out to work, l take my clothes off inside the door, bag them up and and then wash myself and my hair. Open bag with gloves on, and shove clothes in washing machine.

Bag goes in outside bin, take gloves off, throw in bin, open door with my elbow and go and wash my hands.

As it’s been so sunny I’ve been putting post outside as the virus degrades in sunlight. Turn them over after about an hour.*

Wow. How do you have time to do all of this !??

Washing your shopping has made me laugh,,, crazy crazy crazy,

The handwashing advice was based in part on risk surface transmission, ie. not just direct handshake type contact but infection through an intermediary surface. Eg. Infected person coughs on hand, then touches door handle. You then touch that door handle and then later rub your eyes. That has been very clearly stated by the main public health advisers. While they may not see that as the main mode of transmission they obviously see it as very important.

I can't see the difference between that type of transmission, and touching the surfaces of food or packaging that someone potentially infected has recently handled. It is often the same materials involved and the process is the same. Whether we should be disinfecting all shopping I don't really know, but anyone who thinks it is a ridiculous idea.....presumably you're not washing hands then...

To be clear I am not saying it is unreasonable to decide not to disinfect shopping, as I said I am not currently doing it myself though I think I will start, I am just saying the concept is not absurd.

I mean this gently- do you have health anxiety normally? Or do you have a generally unwell member of your household?
I understand the need to keep your family safe, but that is very extreme- and I wonder what it’s doing to your mental health?

No, not one bit. I'm pretty calm about the whole thing as it happens and definitely not someone who worries about health usually.

But, I've read a fair bit about how the virus lives on surfaces, and so this seems like a reasonable response if I want to try to avoid catching it while the peak of cases are hitting the hospital. There is a very real risk of ending up with coronavirus and struggling to breathe but there not being enough ventilators to go around. Haven't you read about Italy?

I suspect the reason people here aren't more concerned about the virus on surfaces is that our government is still in "don't panic" mode instead of focusing on giving us information that will actually help us not catch this thing.

I don't understand what's so odd about stepping up to respond to a threat? I think people I know dying are going to affect my mental health a whole lot more than being suspicious of stuff that comes to my door for the next couple of months o the basis of evidence that I'm right to be suspicious about it.

I also don't understand why people think you need to be freaked out by something, or anxious about it, if you're acting to mitigate it. There are emotional states other than ignoring risks and carrying on as "normal" and being freaked out and acting our of irrational fear. One other state for example is making changes that are relatively easy to do, based on evidence and because - well, why not? These few weeks are weird as fuck anyway, what does it matter if I try to clean coronavirus off my post? I can't see it on my hands either.

It'd be odd behaviour if coronavirus didn't live on surfaces, certainly. But it does, it's spreading exponentially and the hospitals don't have the resources to deal with it. So I'm going to try my best to keep it out of my house.

No one really knows how long coronavirus survives on surfaces but at the moment they're estimating something like 72 hours on plastic and copper and a day on cardboard based on evidence like the study below. Everything that comes through the door is handled by people - they're not delivered by robots - or magic.

If I mess up and touch something I didn't mean to, it doesn't bother me overly. All I can do is have a go at minimising risk. I'm not freaked out about it. I guess that might change if people I care about get to ill they're struggling to breathe, but we're not there yet.

Study link: www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

What if this goes on for months and months? Are you really going to wash down your shopping every time, mental health is going to go through the roof, god knows what this will do to all the kiddies watching their parents go bonkers.
What next steaming the interior of your cars every-time you go for drive to the shops because the shopping has touched things, bleaching your shopping bags out for the next shopping run, the list goes on......
Get a grip!!!!

I'm not doing shopping runs st all if I can possibly help it, until covid 19 is on its way out.

Yes I intend on treating everything that comes through the door as an infection risk. I'm not making a big deal about it though. Nor am I instilling fear in my DC.

Do you know what freaks you out so much about the idea of washing things that come into your house?

Do you think I'm bonkers to wash my hands too?

After last nights hubby got taken to hospital thread after spraying all food items with bleach. I’ll take my chances and just wash my hands after handling them 😂

I have OCD (not generally cleanliness based, sadly for the state of my house!), and I am very wary of this kind of thing, for many people prone to anxiety there is a significant risk of triggering a downward spiral mental health wise, which could ultimately be a lot more dangerous than Covid19 (assuming not in a high risk category for respiratory disease/infection).

Yes, virus can live on surfaces. But it still has to get into your mouth/nose/eyes. That’s why the advice is to wash your hands, properly, more often, especially before eating, and stop touching your face. Unless you lick the outside of your tins and packets, the wash your hands advice is much,
much more important and relevant. And not made unnecessary by wiping down the packaging either, seeing as there’s no guarantee you’ve obliterated 100% of whatever is on the surfaces, short of putting it through an autoclave. You still need to wash your hands and stop touching your face.

There is probably a middle ground of taking precautions with rinsing unpeeled fruit & veg the same as many people do anyway in normal times. And I can understand if you have household members in the very high risk category for Covid19 you may wish to take many more precautions than are necessary for the general population. I’m not laughing at anyone or saying it’s ridiculous, but I do think a lot of what people are saying they’re doing in this thread is completely unnecessary.

Ultimately, if you’re confident your mental health can weather this kind of extra pressure on yourself then there’s little harm really - assuming you’re taking precautions to not consume bleach etc! But there is a risk in ‘promoting’ it (for want of a better word) and saying ‘why wouldn’t you’ etc - many of us wouldn’t because it’s not necessary and the risk to our mental health is significant if we go down that road.

There is so much scaremongering going around, last night it was messages on social media that the army was going to send helicopters out at midnight to spray disinfectant from the sky to kill coronavirus, so don’t go outside. And normally sensible, logical people believed it and were messaging their friends “get your washing in!”. In uncertain, scary times we latch onto any chance to control the risk to ourselves and it’s easy for healthy scepticism/rationality to go out of the window. Just take care of your own, and other peoples mental health as well as physical health, is the message I want to get across.

Eireni

Thank you for an eminently sensible post

No washing hands is good. Your just bonkers full stop. You sound like your already living in a hazmat suit. Good on you though, doing your bit.

Yes it's OTT but I suppose it depends on your attitude to getting it and whether you're at high risk. Its never possible to 100% eliminate all risks. Personally I am ok with residual risk, lots of people apparently are not.

I just couldn't live like this on top of everything else. I'm washing my hands so often that they look like crocodile skin, I'm not leaving the house at all except for a brief 20 minute walk once a day. DH and I are both WFH. That's doing all we've been advised to do by the government and health professionals. If you want to do more than that then by all means crack on but please don't try to imply that others are being lax by not doing it.

Apart from anything else, I don't want my DS to see me washing all my shopping. I suffered from OCD, worked extremely hard to recover, and I don't want my son picking up any anxiety like that. There are going to be a whole generation of children terrified of germs after this as it is. People really need to look at the entire picture, including mental health.