Betcha can't NOT touch your face

Fourteen.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

I’m counting how many times I touch my face while writing this column. Face-touching is a no-no in this Era of the Coronavirus, and I read an article on the Internet, so it has to be true, that says one way to gain awareness is to count.

Obviously, looking up stuff took me 16 face touches. I’m a slow researcher.

But what constitutes a touch? I mean, obviously anytime my fingers make contact with my face or my eyes, but what about resting my chin on my knuckles while I read? Does an extended face-touch like that count as one strike, or do I give myself extra hash marks?

Seventeen. I just brushed my cheek.

I miss the days when you could get information and not question it. Remember the Dracula sneeze? Sneeze into your inside elbow, experts advised, so you look like Bela Lugosi in an old vampire movie.

That was advice to stop flu transmission, and nobody ever doubted it. It was better than sneezing into your hand and then using that hand to shake with new acquaintances, open doors or — wait for it — touch your own face.

Eighteen. Dammit.

The Dracula sneeze, stay home when you’re sick, and wash your hands were uncontestable flu-era cautions.

In this coronavirus debacle, everybody has slightly different opinions. The president indicated it might be okay to go to work while sick, that the virus will retreat when the spring arrives, and that everything is under control. He even suggested the whole scare was a hoax by the Democrats and the Fake News Media, although his cronies later walked back that assertion.

Ever notice how the role of many Republicans in Washington these days is to go on TV and explain what the president really meant to say? But I digress.

Most health experts say don’t go to work if you’re sick, that while the virus may subside with warmer spring weather it could roar back with a vengeance in the fall, and that maybe things are less under control, coronavirus-wise, than we’d like to hope.

Nineteen, 20. Ugh.

Older people should stay away from public places. Anybody who wants to be tested can be tested. The virus lives for X-amount of time on surfaces. It can’t live on food, at least not for very long — unless it can. The mortality rate is (fill in your percentage).

For every piece of information, you don’t have to look very far to find somebody saying something diametrically opposite.

And it’s not just the folks on Fox, who have always lived in an alternate reality. Conflicting advice is everywhere. Wash your hands, but not so much that you dry them out. Dry, cracked skin can be an entry point for viruses. So wash your hands a whole lot, but in moderation.

Then there are the opportunists. The folks selling protection kits at ginned-up prices. The educational companies pushing study-from-home platforms to schools where classes have been cancelled. Retailers who move paper towels and cleaning supplies to the front of the store, capitalizing on high-traffic areas even as experts tell us not to stockpile. Or to stockpile only a little bit.

Twenty-one. Rubbed my eye.

This coronavirus stuff is enough to make anybody stress out. And when I stress out, guess what I do?

That’s right.

Twenty-two through thirty.

Coronavirus, here I come.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter