The Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, decided o use the power of social media to create awareness about the precautions everyone should take surrounding the coronavirus.

The novel Covid-19 virus is highly contagious and can spread from one person to another. Ever since the breakout of the virus, the World Health Organisation has put out guidelines online to help people understand the virus and how they can stay safe.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

One of the most important guidelines has been to frequently wash your hands with soap and water. Specifically for 20-40 seconds.

Washing your hands ensures that the germs on your hands don’t end up infecting you. Additionally, everyone is told to keep their hands away from their face – especially their mouth, nose and eyes.

A lot of the general public is still not following this part of the guidelines and are just focusing on wearing masks. This defeats the purpose. If you wear a mask but don’t wash your hands the infection will still make it to you via your own hands.

In order to get the message out to more people on social media Dr.Tedros tweeted out the #SafeHands challenge.

The challenge is meant to encourage people to wash their hands for 40 seconds regularly. So they can keep the virus at bay.

Dr. Tedros challenged Deepika Padukone and she accepted and delivered right away!

Thank You @DrTedros, for nominating me for the #SafeHands Challenge!#COVID19 surely is an uphill health and public safety task, but all of us are in this fight together!I further nominate @rogerfederer,@Cristiano and @imVkohli to take up this challenge! #coronavirus #StaySafe https://t.co/45glSxXkqP pic.twitter.com/7s7R4pIrrL

— Deepika Padukone (@deepikapadukone) March 17, 2020

Washing your hands and social distancing are the two main ways of keeping the coronavirus far far away from you.

Would you participate in the #SafeHands challenge?