Low Life | 18 April 2009

I’m virus aware. For example, I don’t touch door handles in public lavatories. If they’ve got in-swinging doors, I time my exit to coincide with someone else and let them grasp the handle. And I never, ever, touch the rubber handrail on Tube station escalators. Imagine what hundreds of thousands of commuting fingertips deposit on one of those during the course of a day! I suppose the paranoia is a leftover from my nursing days. Once you learn about the mechanics of infection, you hear it in every stranger’s cough or sneeze, and see it on every hotel TV remote.

I’m always conscious, too, of the 40,000 potentially infectious droplets that fly out of a person’s mouth at speeds variously estimated at between 95 and 650 miles per hour when a person sneezes. I sat in a claustrophobic doctors’ waiting room this week, in which half a dozen patients sat facing each other across a pile of grubby old Yachting Monthlys and sneezed at each other.