What are ‘Fomites,’ and How to Avoid Catching Covid-19 From Them

An unfamiliar word you may see in the news a lot right now is ‘Fomite Transmission.’ I’m going to explain what it is and how it relates to protecting yourself from catching Covid-19 through your face.

‘Fomites’ are objects that, when contaminated with germs (such as bacteria, viruses or fungi), can transfer disease to a new host.

It could be a scalpel, phone, pencil, door handle, buffet serving spoon, a touch screen or light switch — anything a germ can live on long enough for sick people to contaminate it. This can happen through a variety of ways: coughing/sneezing/breathing or flushing a toilet and aerosolizing pathogens (even using hand dryers can disperse bacteria around a room), but the most common way is for people’s dirty hands to spread germs onto shared surfaces.

The next people to touch the fomite can then become infected themselves, often by touching our faces with contaminated hands: especially our mucous membranes (eyes, mouth, nose).

Fomites have been known since at least 1546, when the Italian physician/scholar Girolamo Fracastoro used the Latin word fomes (meaning “tinder”) in his essay on contagion, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis. By 1658 it was in use in English, and the latin plural version ‘fomites’ (Foh-Mee-Tays) eventually became the ‘Foh-Mites’ by the mid-1900s.

“By ‘fomes’ I mean clothes, wooden objects, and things of that sort, which though not themselves corrupted can, nevertheless, preserve the original germs of the contagion and infect by means of these.”

The term may be new to most of us, but the concept is something we all know… and rarely think about except when we see someone walk out of the bathroom without washing their hands, or sneezing onto an ATM machine.

Think about the number of things you touch every day that have been touched by one or two other people…like the fridge door handle in your kitchen…and the things you touch that hundreds or THOUSANDS of people have handled daily: the crosswalk signal button…the handrail going down into the subway…the credit card machine at the grocery store…and these all pose a potential risk for Covid-19 infection (and flu and other infections as well).

#2 is bread that is untouched. #3, #4 and #5 were handled with hands of varying dirtiness. And #1 is a slice of bread wiped on a Chromebook. Just saying. Hands get gross quickly.

There’s a lot of debate over exactly how long or how well this new bug can live on various surfaces, and difficult to say exactly how much transmission is from fomites and not direct person-person spread, but let’s look just at what EVERYONE is in agreement about:

1. We know for sure that it CAN live outside the body on various surfaces for hours to days, and this is plenty long enough to infect the next person to touch the fomite.
2. We know that sick people deposit Covid-19 on surfaces and create fomites: researchers found “swabs taken from air exhaust outlets tested positive, suggesting that small virus-laden droplets may be displaced by airflows and deposited on equipment such as vents.” They found virus on swabs from 13 of 15 room sites including fans, toilet bowls, sinks, and door handles, concluding that “significant environmental contamination by patients with SARS-CoV-2 through respiratory droplets and fecal shedding suggests the environment as a potential medium of transmission.”
3. We know that a key path by which people get infected from fomites is by touching the fomite and then touching our faces.
4. We know face-touching is nearly impossible to just stop. People touch their face up to 20+ times an hour, for a variety of reasons: to manage our appearance (makeup and hair), to communicate when talking, and to self-sooth (touching your face actually changes your brainwaves!)

So no matter what the exact details turn out to be, we KNOW for sure right now that fomites and face-touching pose a risk, and not touching our faces (which really costs nothing and doesn’t immediately impact our economy or society) would be a really good new habit to be creating right now. Despite this, it’s a huge challenge for most of us to achieve.

In times of significant need but when resources are short, the best solutions are innovative, affordable, available and easy-to-implement. So in that spirit, Floating Doctors offers a novel solution to the impossible new ‘don’t touch your face’ commandment: We want to bring back the veil.

Audrey Hepburn proved you can rock a veil even over a century so there’s a fashion precedent for this as well as life-saving potential.

Of course not everyone has a veil lying around. So in true resource-limited-health-care style, we suggest a simple alternative that we believe can completely prevent you from touching your face: the mosquito head-net.

Put it over your head when you go outside your house and begin to navigate the fomite minefield that is our daily environment, and when you get home, wash your hands and then take off the net.

It won’t protect you from inhaled droplets (only a properly fitted n95 mask will do that) but we believe it will work about as well this veterinary collar to keep you from touching your face, without the terrible indignity!

Easy. Cheap. Simple. A solution you can implement right now — and more importantly, something you can DO to fight Covid-19, rather than something NOT to do. It’s a lot harder to NOT touch our faces than to DO an action that stops the face-touching for us!

Hopefully this is something we can have fun with; as those of us with kids start running out of crafts to do, DIY veils and nets could be fun.

Go on Amazon, dig your mosquito head net out of your camping gear, or make your own — and veil up before you go outside. You should still take other precautions as well — this is an ‘in addition to’ not ‘instead of’ layer of protection, but we intend a head net or veil as a solution you can implement right now to at least stop touching your face once and for all.

And it works on mosquitos, too.