Hygiene is essential to preventing diseases and illnesses across the world and should be taken seriously in all manners of life, especially in a post-COVID-19 world.
Over the last few years, the coronavirus pandemic caused many to take new precautions in how they lived their lives. They prioritized handwashing, cleaning their homes and even made changes in the places that they traveled to.
As the pandemic has diminished in prominence though, it feels as if the public focus on hygiene has become less important, which opens us up to more risk of illness and disease moving forward.
This risk is especially prominent on places like college campuses where a large number of people are in close proximity to each other day after day, making the potential spread of illness much more of a threat.
There are steps that can be taken to prevent this though and they should be highlighted so everyone can stay safe.
One way to prevent illnesses is by taking care of your body and keeping good hygiene. COVID-19 in particular emphasized the importance of personal hygiene when combating illness and disease.
Handwashing statistics increased during and after the pandemic compared to the years before. According to a study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), only 47.6% of responders washed their hands more than five times per day before the pandemic, which increased to 82.2% during the pandemic.
Clean hands decrease disease and illness around the world, and a clean world allows everything to run smoothly. This increased awareness of keeping one’s hands clean led to many prioritizing clean homes and workspaces as well, which along with the introduction of the vaccine, helped get us through the worst part of the pandemic.
Another way to prevent illness is to make use of the resources provided to you by your school or work. If your school provides flu shot clinics, use them. If your workplace has hand sanitizer stations, use them whenever you walk by.
These small steps can make big changes in decreasing your risk of sickness and by extension, keep others in your community safe.
As COVID-19 becomes a distant memory for many, people have become more relaxed regarding hygiene and cleanliness. They do not treat the pandemic with as much reverence as they once did and are allowing bad habits to come back into their lives.
The need for personal hygiene today is more important than any other time in our lives. The threat of widespread illnesses and a pandemic that has not entirely gone away will be a looming threat for years to come.
As spring begins and the spreading of germs and regular allergies becomes more prominent, personal hygiene and cleanliness could be the most important weapons we have to fight against sickness on our college campuses, in our workplaces and beyond.
When everyone takes these small steps together, we can create a massive change and make sure that we are doing our best to keep everyone in our communities as safe as we can.
Categories: Opinion
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