File: Handwashing. Credit: Pixabay. CC0 Creative Commons The best defense to the coronavirus is simple: Wash your hands. From a regular bar of soap to the fancy soaps you buy at specialty stores, the chemicals in all of these obliterate the virus. It doesn’t matter if it’s liquid, name brand, bar soap – as long as you use soap and water to wash your hands for a good 20 seconds, you’re literally killing the virus on your hands and washing it down the sink. If you don’t have soap and water available, hand sanitizers with at least 60 percent alcohol are just as effective. A chemistry professor at Florida Gulf Coast University said it’s best if you’re doing both. “Hand sanitizer…they have alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, ethanol and they kill the virus, but the mechanism of soap is different; they are both equally good to fight the coronavirus,” said Arsalan Mirjafari, FGCU professor of chemistry. The only downside to this is that sweat on your hands could dilute the sanitizer. Plus, you don’t have the water aspect to wash away the dead cells.