To stop the spread of coronavirus, many states are under stay-at-home orders, and travel restrictions are in place limiting where you can go.

But that doesn’t mean many well-meaning people may not wind up exposing themselves to germs unwittingly.

On a recent trip to the grocery store, Molly Lixey, a former emergency room nurse in Saginaw, Michigan, told CNN she noticed a lot of people wearing gloves, which she thought was great.

But what wasn’t so great?

All the cross-contamination she saw.

In an off-the-cuff Facebook video, Lixey decided to demonstrate just how quick and easy it is to spread germs at a grocery store.

A worker places groceries from an online order into a delivery bin in Windsor, Connecticut. Credit: Scott Eisen / Bloomberg

“I was doing some painting around the house and it hit me that paint would be a perfect medium to use to explain this (cross-contamination),” she told CNN.

“It terrifies me to think people believe they’re safe only because they are wearing gloves and not have them be aware that they could still be harming themselves or others,” she said.

We know that coronavirus can spread through sneezes and coughs.

And new research shows it can be passed from talking - or possibly even just breathing - which makes passing germs from object to object that much easier.

Molly Lixey explains cross-contamination on Facebook. Credit: Molly Lixey / Facebook

In her video, Lixey simulates going to the grocery store.

She starts off by putting gloves on her hands, grabbing her mobile phone as she leaves her car, cleaning a shopping cart and grabbing some toilet paper.

She uses a piece of cardboard as her mobile phone and dips her fingers in a plate of paint to symbolise the germs on her hands as a result of grabbing toilet paper.

Eventually, after picking up a simulated phone call, the paint winds up on her cheek, symbolising the germs that would have travelled to her face.

Even once she takes the gloves off, Lixey shows the paint had wound up on her makeshift phone, which she holds after taking the gloves off - ultimately resulting in cross-contamination.

Her general message?

“There’s no point in wearing gloves if you’re not gonna wash your hands every time you touch something,” she said in the video.

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That’s because whatever gets on the gloves would migrate to the phone if someone picked it up.

Then unless the person disinfects the phone, the germs on it would travel to his or her hand once the gloves were off and the person touched the device.

Lixey currently works inside an infusion clinic at a doctor’s office.

She says if the virus continues to spread in her area more, she will go back to working in a hospital setting.

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She isn’t the only one taking to social media to educate on the importance of understanding how germs spread.

Hays Earls, a registered nurse in Dallas, Texas, made a TikTok video of an experiment she did to show her three-year-old son how germs stick to our hands and how washing them with soap removes them.

Viral hit

In the video, Earls’ son dips his finger into a bowl of water with pepper sprinkled on the top.

When he takes his finger out, it’s covered in pepper, simulating how germs cling to skin.

She then pumps some soap on a clean finger and as he dips that into the bowl, the pepper spreads away from his finger.

Earls said she’s happy to pass the experiment onto other parents and that the visual lesson worked with her son.

In fact, now her son wants to do the ‘washing hands trick’ every time they pass a sink.