I work for an eyebank now and go to morgues and funeral homes to remove corneas from qualified dead people.
The national eyebank organizations is constantly coming out with updates on what cases to take and how to handle things. They are not taking cases where the potential donor is potentially a corona virus exposed person.
They are also going to be reducing the amount of cases overall since many places are greatly reduing or eliminating elective surgeries (which most corneal transplants are). So demand (corneal surgeries) will be down and corneas can only be kept around in a useful condition for a limited time.
A case I did on Monday was on a morgue table (on wheels) shared with a body bag labeled covid-19. Things are kept pretty clean in the morgues (run by health care professionals). Funeral homes on the other hand tend to be kind of messy and poorly kept relative to morgues.
As I go through the hospital to get access to the morgue (controlled accesss due to ME cases and other reasons), I am becoming more conscious of what I touch while there. For example, door handles, door opener buttons (common, but not ubiquitous in hospitals), and elevator buttons. Here are some strategies I have thought of (in consultation with others) to reduce these kinds of contacts.
Door opening buttons (4-6" diameter on walls) hit with elbow or hip.
Someone suggested putting on two pair of gloves before going in, so you can take one pair off if you think its contaminated and still have a glove on (beside the eyebank supplies, I have a several boxes of nice nitrile gloves at home and now in cars. These are handy and more are available at my local Harbor Freight store at reasonable prices (limit of four boxes last time I looked).
Gloves will work well for door knobs, but wearing gloves around places like hospitals can evoke responses from others since you are usually not supposed to go around with PPE (personal protective equipment, like gloves) on outside of labs since it is a potential source of contamination for others. This may change.
Gloves would work well for door knobs.
For elevators, I figure at least 90% of the people working in the hospital I spend most of my time in will touch an elevator button during a day. I have started using a pen to push the buttons. The pen can be sterilized with alcohol or by some other means. Now I am considering putting a glove over the pen so I can even more easily pitch it rather than sterilize it.
I have worked with even more nasty things in labs in the past (such as very efficient vertebrate mutagens) and feel that given time, approaches like this can be effective. On the other hand, a lab doing mutagenesis is a much more controlled environment.
However, there is a learning curve when it comes to behavioral changes (like not touching your face), so it is good to start trying to do these things before local exposure increases (ass it probably will).
I would be interested in hearing from
@berkeman (or other health care people) about his experiences and what they are doing since he is an EMT and probably has greater exposire than I do.
