Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said. “It’s not rocket science: The hand is a very good medium to transmit disease.”
It’s a message that Sklansky has been proselytizing for the better part of a decade—via word of mouth among his patients, impassioned calls to action in medical journals, even DIY music videos that warn against puttin’ ’er there. But for a long time, his calls to action were met with scoffs and skepticism.
So when the coronavirus started its sweep across the United States three years ago, Sklansky couldn’t help but feel a smidgen of hope. He watched as corporate America pocketed its dealmaking palms, as sports teams traded end-of-game grasps for air-fives, and as The New Yorker eulogized the gesture’s untimely end. My colleague Megan Garber celebrated the handshake’s demise, as did Anthony Fauci. The coronavirus was a horror, but perhaps it could also be a wake-up call. Maybe, just maybe, the handshake was at last dead. “I was optimistic that it was going to be it,” Sklansky told me.
But the death knell rang too soon. “Handshakes are back,” says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert and the founder of the Protocol School of Texas. The gesture is too ingrained, too beloved, too irreplaceable for even a global crisis to send it to an early grave. “The handshake is the vampire that didn’t die,” says Ken Carter, a psychologist at Emory University. “I can tell you that it lives: I shook a stranger’s hand yesterday.”
The base science of the matter hasn’t changed. Hands…
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