We need cultural changes.<p>More self checkout.<p>More automatic sliding doors.<p>Better designed public bathrooms similar to Walmart bathrooms: No door at all; choice between paper towels and hot air hand dryer; touchless faucets and automatic flush toilets.<p>Hand sanitizer at every cash register.<p>Better training for cashiers. Cashiers who do things like lick their fingers to open bags have long been the bane of my existence because I have a compromised immune system.<p>What we are doing now is not the way it has to be. PPE is not the optimal solution.<p>I think we have our priorities backwards. We emphasize the hell out of hand washing. It's number one on the list of "five things" the WHO is encouraging people to do to stop the spread.<p>Number three is "Stop touching your face." That should be the top priority. It's prevention.<p>Emphasizing hand washing as more important than "stop touching your face" is implicitly telling people "It's okay to expose yourself. Just use soap afterwards and everything will be okay."<p>No, it won't. You need to stop touching your face. You need to stop licking your fingers to separate grocery bags.<p>On top of that, you should also wash hands frequently. But washing hands frequently isn't enough in the current culture where people are oblivious about the things they touch.<p>When I ask cashiers "Please don't do that" or "Please use hand sanitizer now that you have licked your fingers" they sometimes tell me they didn't do what I just watched them do seconds ago. They do it so habitually, they aren't even consciously aware of it anymore.<p>In some cases, they get belligerent with me. How dare I ask them to practice germ control! How rude!<p>Yes, this was mostly before the pandemic. I've been trying to protect myself from infection for a lot of years. It's largely irrelevant to my point.<p>My son told me he saw two people hugging in the parking lot of the grocery store and one of them confusedly asked "Aren't we supposed to not hug?" and the other, an older person, dismissed that with "We aren't supposed to hug strangers!"<p>Even with their lives on the line, people are failing to get the memo that you can't run around touching everyone and everything. This needs to somehow stop and I'm appalled that the WHO is part of the problem here in that they are emphasizing hand washing as the top priority rather than emphasizing "Keep your hands clean to begin with by not touching every damn thing, especially not your face."<p>And I don't know if the WHO is that stupid and honest to god doesn't realize that not touching stuff is the more important thing or if they have studies and yadda and they believe that it is a lost cause to tell people "No, really, <i>stop touching stuff!!!</i>" and hand washing will get more compliance, so they emphasize that.<p>But they have their priorities backwards. We can get this under control, but we have to practice germ control and the messaging we are getting is insufficient.