A pivotal issue of handwashing with soap before COVID-19 Vaccination

Handwashing with soap is one of the cost-effective way of preventing the spread of communicable diseases such as respiratory transmitted infection like COVID-19. Existing evidence showed that about 50% of pneumonia, 16-23% of acute respiratory infection, and 48% of diarrhoeal diseases can be reduced by the practice of proper handwashing with soap (UNICEF, 2020). The COVID-19 was first introduced in December 2019 Wuhan, China (Zhu et al., 2020). This disease spread all over the world where 117,172,631 persons were coronavirus infected and 2,601,523 were died by the date of March 8, 2021 (Worldmeter, 2021).  On March 2020, the World Health Organization declared that the diseases is a public health emergency and called a pandemic (The Lancet Infectious, 2020). This article aimed to raise issue of the importance of handwashing during COVID-19 vaccination.

A preventive measure such as social distancing mention, face mask-wearing, handwashing with soap and early case identification through contact tracing were recommended and other side different researchers and scientists started introducing vaccine. Coronavirus vaccine is only the best way of preventing virus spread from one person to another. Different coronavirus vaccines are currently under clinical trials to determine their safety and efficacy globally (WHO, 2020). About 35 countries have already started administrating Covid-19 vaccine and the UK is the first country in the world administrating COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020 (Aljazeera, 2020). In line with this action, other countries also expected to launch soon COVID-19 vaccination to their citizen. 

In this context, the person normally health worker, who handle vaccination session needs to adopt effective handwashing with soap practice before each session of vaccination. The literature says only 84% of the health facilities have adequate handwashing with soap facilities in the world (UNICEF, 2020). This means about 16% of the health facilities have an absence of such facilities and the handwashing compliance is lower among the health workers during-, after-, and before touching patients. This practice may cause diseases transmission. Health worker’s handwashing compliance before contacting new patients  was only 30% in Australia (Victoria. Department of Health, 2013) and 24% in Nepal (Baral, Sagtani, & Rajbhandari, 2018) base studies. Therefore health workers must adopt safety measure and complete proper hand hygiene before preparing vaccine and contact between two people. Proper handwashing prevents spread the infection to the new host. An individual person has germs around the arms and bottom which might be touch by health workers during vaccination and cause hands contamination. The contaminated hands carry virus and bacteria and if they are not washed with soap and water then it helps to transmit diseases to others. The standard steps of handwashing are recommended as- make hands wet with  tap water, put soap around the hands, rub hands properly at least 20 seconds, rinse hands with water, and make them dry using clean towel (Pittet, Allegranzi, Boyce, & World Health Organization World Alliance for Patient Safety First Global Patient Safety Challenge Core Group of, 2009). Therefore, handwashing with soap is the best way to preventing diseases transmission during covid-19 vaccination (CDC, 2021). 

References

Aljazeera. (2020). Which countries have rolled out COVID vaccine? Retrieved from h
ttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/vaccine-rollout-which-countries-have-started

Baral, K. P., Sagtani, R. A., & Rajbhandari, A. K. (2018). Hand hygiene compliance among rural healthcare workers of Nepal. Journal of Patan Academy of Health Sciences, 5(1), 90-95. doi:10.3126/jpahs.v5i1.24050

CDC. (2021). Prepare the vaccine(s). Retrieved from h
ttps://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/admin/prepare-vaccines.html

Pittet, D., Allegranzi, B., Boyce, J., & World Health Organization World Alliance for Patient Safety First Global Patient Safety Challenge Core Group of, E. (2009). The World Health Organization Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care and their consensus recommendations. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 30(7), 611-622. doi:10.1086/600379

The Lancet Infectious, D. (2020). COVID-19, a pandemic or not? The Lancet infectious diseases, 20(4). doi:10.1016/s1473-3099(20)30180-8

UNICEF. (2020). Handwashing with soap, critical in the fight against coronavirus, is ‘out of reach’ for billions. Retrieved from h
ttps://www.unicef.org/press-releases/fact-sheet-handwashing-soap-critical-fight-against-coronavirus-out-reach-billions

Victoria. Department of Health. (2013). Health: Report to the Minister for Health from the Expert Panel on Hand Hygiene. Retrieved from Australia: 

WHO. (2020). Draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines: World Health Organization.

Worldmeter. (2021). COVID-19  Coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Zhu, N., Zhang, D., Wang, W., Li, X., Yang, B., Song, J., . . . Lu, R. (2020). A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019. New England Journal of Medicine.