To say goodbye in the Covid era, it is better to put your hand on your heart than to rotate your shoulder and offer your elbow. When we all got used to it, the WHO bans the greeting passed off as a virus. And that by now had taken hold among heads of state, entertainers, leaders of civil protection. In vogue even among doctors and experts of the technical-scientific committee, called to suggest to the government and all Italians how to behave in order to deal with the epidemic.
But on the elbow salute all in error. To explain it to us is not just anyone, but the director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who used Twitter to spread the recommendation, releasing a critical message on the new practice of the economist Diana Ortega. “When greeting people, it is best to avoid touching each other with your elbows because this makes you less than a meter away from each other. I like to put a hand on my heart to greet people these days, ”wrote the WHO director. Which in truth in March the photographers immortalized with the elbow raised. For hygienic purposes, and nothing else, of course.
It must be said that the same Organization has always invited people to use the bend of the elbow when sneezing or coughing. And that the two things conflict has become clear even to those who should juggle notes rather than health prescriptions. A few days ago the Conservatory of Sassari in fact issued a decree to explicitly prohibit “the unwary new habit”. Even if there are those who go further. Like Professor Gaetano Libra, an ENT laryngologist with a long career behind him at the Ospedale Maggiore in Bologna. For him “it is wrong to use the elbow also to stop sneezing and coughing, since we then place it almost everywhere contaminating other surfaces”.
A diatribe that proves how tiring it is to live in year one of the Coronavirus. Which is spreading more and more in Europe. So much so that the WHO director himself warns: “The average number of cases in Europe is higher than the first peak in March and in October and November we will see more mortality”. “We’re not exactly off the hook.” And putting a hand on your heart will not be enough to get us out.
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