Can You Really Kill COVID With Mouthwash?
It turns out that mouthwash isn't just useful when it comes to keeping up with good hygiene and hot dates. It might protect you from COVID-19 too.
There are mixed degrees of excitement over the recent stories about mouthwash being an effective tool in the fight against COVID-19, but at least it's something.
Researchers are proving that COVID can be zapped by mouthwash. That's good news. The new coronavirus falls into the 99.9% of the germs and bacteria that make mouthwash effective, and gargling with it could protect against getting the virus, and it could keep it from spreading. They have to do more studies and trials to know for sure, but the news has been encouraging so far.
But the so-so news is, they're still trying to figure out how exactly the virus impacts the body, and mouthwash alone probably isn't foolproof. This we could probably guess. It's reasonable to think that if we're within six feet of someone who has the virus and they sneeze, and we take a deep mouth-wide-open breath and take in the germs but we gargle with mouthwash immediately after, even if some of the viruses die in the rinse, others might make it further into the body and cause trouble in a few days. But could an infected person who uses mouthwash become a neutral carrier?
It could be a big breakthrough if scientists could figure out a way to trap COVID-19 in an infected person and keep it from getting out of his or her body. If mouthwash can neutralize carriers, it could become an effective safety tool right there with facemasks and social distancing.
A clinical trial is coming up that will test four types of mouthwash, according to The Washington Post, including CloSys, Oral-B Mouth Sore, Crest Pro-Health Multi-Protection, and Listerine. They'll aim to figure out whether the rinses reduce virus transmission and whether regular mouthwash use will improve symptoms for people who have the virus.
The way some mouthwash burns, it's got to be doing something! We'll wait to find out just how much.