Coronavirus: Video of pepper and soap trick demonstrates importance of washing hands

A popular trick using pepper, soap and water is being used to educate children on the importance of washing their hands amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Following the news that the coronavirus is affecting an increasing number of people worldwide, members of the public have been urged to wash their hands regularly and thoroughly.

The advice being by health authorities is to wash your hands with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds, roughly the same amount of time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice.

In order to ensure that children understand how vital it is that they practise good hand hygiene, a simple, fascinating trick has been developed using soap, pepper and water.

Amanda Lorenzo, a pre-kindergarten teacher from Miami, Florida, shared a video on Instagram showing how the trick works, much to the amazement of the children she teaches.

In the video, Ms Lorenzo asks a child to dip their finger into “virus water”, which is a bowl of water filled with pepper.

When the child takes their finger out of the water, it has specks of pepper attached to it, representing “the virus”.

Ms Lorenzo then has the child place their finger in a bowl of soap, before dipping their finger back into the bowl of pepper.

When the child does this, the pepper rapidly moves away from the soap-covered finger.

“How did it move? It moved!” the children can be heard saying, before Ms Lorenzo responds: “You see how important it is to wash our hands?”

McFly bandmember Tom Fletcher spotted the pepper soap trick circulating online, and so decided to attempt it with his own children.

“Here’s an awesome way to help your kids understand why we need to wash our hands. I saw a video online of a teacher doing this with her class and thought I’d try it,” the musician said in an Instagram caption.

“Spreading knowledge, not germs!”

Professor Lucy Rogers, of Brunel University, went into further detail in a TikTok video explaining how the pepper soap trick works.

For her experiment, Professor Rogers mixed together some pepper, oil and water.

“Now the pepper represents a virus, the oil is the fat that holds the virus together and the water is just, water,” she said.

“Now if I just put my finger into the mixture, nothing much happens,” the professor says, demonstrating as such.

“Now if I put soap on my hands, my fingers my hands all soapy, and then I put my soapy finger in, all the pepper — or the virus — runs away.”

If you have any coronavirus symptoms or have recently travelled to an affected area, contact the NHS helpline on 111 and do not visit your GP or hospital.