You’ve probably heard much talk this year about washing your hands with soap. Perhaps you’ve heard that soap is better at removing the COVID-19 coronavirus than hand sanitizer. (There is a myth out there that hand sanitizer is better, perhaps because it’s not “old-school” like soap.) But do you know why soap is better?

If you haven’t thought much about it, you might assume that soap helps wash away the germs on your hands. It probably does help with it. However, its effectiveness against COVID-19 (and other sickness-causing germs) is much darker than you would imagine: Soap is not just washing it away — it’s ripping it apart, destroying it violently. If you want to read how and why it does that, read this: How soap absolutely annihilates the coronavirus. If you don’t have time to read/watch it, here’s important info you should know: Just washing your hands with water does not wash away the coronavirus or other similar germs. Also, you need to have soap on your hands for 20 seconds for it to do its thing. That’s not just a made-up number (like the suggestion to brush your teeth for two minutes) — it actually takes 20 seconds.

The next time you’re washing your hands with soap and have them lathered up really good and are waiting 20 seconds before rinsing, take a look at the soap bubbles on your hands and think of how they are single-handedly destroying COVID-19 germs. (Oops, that was almost a pun… there’s probably one you could make by changing a word or two, but I’m not going there.)