Walking around town I see quite a few people wearing gloves in addition to a mask. But is this actually useful? COVID-19 does not transmit via the skin, so you don't need to protect your hands per se. And you can still touch your face even if you're wearing gloves. Is there any research showing that gloves help against respiratory diseases?
If you are dealing with an infectious agent transmitted by bodily fluids, HIV or Ebola say, then gloves are an important element of personal protective equipment. Gloves help prevent infectious fluid from getting into cuts and scrapes on your hands.
For air-borne and droplet transmitted pathogens the situation is more complicated. Improperly used, gloves can actually contribute to the spread of infection.
When properly used, gloves can reduce cross contamination between activities and help prevent infection of the wearer. The trick is that between activities you have to change gloves and wash or sanitize your hands. If you've ever watched a health care worker using gloves is goes roughly like this:
- wash/sanitize hands
- Carefully don gloves
- Perform procedure.
- Carefully remove gloves, avoiding touching the outer surface of the glove.
- wash/sanitize hands Repeat
This minimizes the chance of transmitting infection from one patient to the next, and provides protection for the glove wearer by minimizing the time they have potentially infectious materials on their bare hand or glove surface.
Simply wearing a single pair of gloves around all day isn't going to accomplish anything. One of my pet peeves is the occasional inattentive cafe worker who wears gloves to handle the food, then goes to the cash register and handles money from a customer still wearing their gloves, then goes back to handling the food still wearing the same gloves, but the gloves are now potentially contaminated from handling the money!
My research search-fu is rather weak, and it's also quite likely that such research doesn't exist as it's not really how latex (or equivalent) gloves work. The gloves will support infectious agents just as readily as your hands, but the benefit comes from the ability to take them off (I mean, you COULD take your hands off, but it's a bit excessive).
Hand washing is effective against pathogen spread, but 20 seconds of handwashing only kills MOST of the virus or other pathogen on your hands (that research is for Ebola, but similar results are likely for other pathogens). Removing the gloves (properly) effectively removes 100%, and with very little practice, takes much less than 20 seconds (especially if you eliminate the travel time to a hand-wash station and back).
Frequent and purposeful glove change would then allow significant reduction of pathogen transmission via the hands (or hand-like surface).