国家地理:新冠病毒和洗手文化(1)

"You have come from Mumbai to teach us about handwashing?"

“你专程从孟买来教我们洗手？”

The villagers couldn't stop laughing at Yusuf Kabir. He works at UNICEF's Mumbai office, in a division with an apt acronym -- WASH, for water, sanitation, and hygiene -- and he was on a tour of the Latur district, some 250 miles east of Mumbai, to advocate hand hygiene as a safeguard of health. In Latur, as elsewhere in the state of Maharashtra, Kabir was learning that handwashing just wasn't a priority for many villagers. "They couldn't see any tangible impact," he recalls.

村民止不住地嘲笑着尤苏夫·卡比尔。他在联合国儿童基金会位于孟买的办公室工作。他部门的名称缩写恰好是WASH，负责供水、卫生设施与个人卫生，他来到孟买东边约400公里处的拉杜尔地区，向民众倡导洗手是一种健康的保障。卡比尔发现，在拉杜尔，就像在马哈拉什特拉邦其他地区一样，许多村民不重视洗手。他回忆说：“他们意识不到洗手有任何实质影响。”

That was long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

这是早在COVID-19大流行之前的事了。

On March 24, the same day Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered India's more than 1.3 billion citizens to stay inside their homes for at least three weeks -- a period he later extended -- researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom released a study documenting a strong correlation between the size of a country's COVID-19 outbreak and the weakness of its handwashing culture. That survey too was done before COVID-19.

3月24日，印度总理纳伦德拉·莫迪下令全国超过13亿人必须待在家中至少三个星期（他后来又延长了这个期限），同一天，英国伯明翰大学的研究人员发表了一项研究，证明了一个国家的COVID-19爆发和欠缺洗手文化存在很强的相关性。这项调查也是在COVID-19爆发前完成的。