This Is the ONLY Way You Could Get COVID-19 In Grocery Stores

If the pandemic has given us something, it’s the anxiety we get before every grocery shopping session. Should we sanitize every item we get? Can we safely touch packaged goods? Will we contaminate our car or home by purchasing one item or another?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally sheds a light on how safe grocery shopping really is and how to do it right.

The fear of touching anything

I’ll start with the most important information first: one does NOT get COVID-19 as easily as it was initially thought.

The CDC issued the first series of advice to protect ourselves from the new coronavirus back in March. At the time, researchers were still unsure about how long the virus can survive on different surfaces causing mass panic around the globe. After all, how could you protect yourself from an invisible threat that could lurk around anything you touch?

The public fear was amplified by a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine which found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could survive on some surfaces for days. Although the small study didn’t offer any evidence that people could get infected this way, it was more than enough to spark tension.

Now, the CDC’s website says that it is unlikely to contract the new coronavirus by touching surfaces or objects.

How you might actually get COVID-19

As I write this article, both the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) agree that the most likely way you could get infected with SARS-CoV-2 is through person-to-person contact. Here’s how:

• Standing closer than six feet to an infected person;
• When small droplets are expelled by an infected person when they sneeze, cough or talk;
• If these droplets land on your mouth, nose or if you breathe them in and they get to your lungs.

This conclusion comes after tracking hundreds of thousands of cases and finding how patients got infected. As the CDC adds, it might be possible that COVID-19 can spread in other ways too, but your actual chances of infection are minimal in such cases.

RELATED: Eating Out Puts You at Bigger Risk for COVID-19, Study Says

What you should do

So the great news is that touching an orange at the grocery store probably won’t give you COVID-19. However, that doesn’t mean we should stop applying safety measures every time we go out.

Below, I’ll just drop a quick reminder of everything you can (and should!) do during every trip to the grocery store. I know you’ve probably heard all of this a million times before, but it is crucial that we adopt all these measures in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones:

• Always wear a mask correctly when out in public
• Maintain a social distance of at least two feet
• Always use a sanitizers after touching public surfaces
• Wash your hands as soon as you get home

How do you manage grocery shopping? Let us know in the comment section and let’s chat!