Culture

Washing Your Hands Free From Coronavirus Has Become A Huge Meme

If you aren't washing your hands to the democracy manifest man, you're doing it all wrong.

by Michelle Rennex  12 March 2020
coronavirus washing hands meme

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As coronavirus is the only thing on anyone’s mind right now, it’s no surprise that people are doing all they can to avoid getting the illness.

With the news that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have contracted COVID-19 coronavirus in Australia, people are finally starting to take it all a little more seriously. Now officially declared a pandemic, the hand washing techniques encouraged by health organisations are important as ever.

A popular technique encouraged by the World Health Organisation is singing a 20-second song to help time your hand washing. A common suggestion for this has been to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice over as you scrub your hands all over.

To help demonstrate what a thorough job looks like, the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK released a 13-step graphic. The image had a step-by-step guide on the proper practice for hand-washing with soap and water, but was quickly turned into a meme online.

Following the recommendation to time your hand-washing to a song, people started pairing the graphic with unexpected lyrics. Even Rage Against The Machine hopped in on the trend suggesting that ‘Killing in the Name’ would make a perfect coronavirus preventer.

These Wash Your Lyrics memes were made possible by 17-year-old William Gibson who created a non-profit website to give people a wider choice of songs beyond ‘Happy Birthday’.

The site pulls lyrics from Genius, and turns any song into a hand-washing poster for either soap on gel sanitisers. While some bands and artists used the template as a genuine way to promote their songs and proper washing techniques, others quickly hijacked the site to put the dumbest (but best) songs on posters.

But even better, as the Wash Your Lyrics website offers a custom option for any text to be input, people started combining iconic speeches with the posters — like Julia Gillard’s unforgettable misogyny speech.

Soon the inevitable happened — people started combining older memes with Wash Your Lyric to create monster hybrids that hilariously promoted cleanliness. After all, who doesn’t want to wash their hands to Snooki and JWoww’s “anonymous” Jersey Shore note to Sammie about her cheater man, Ron. Or to Pooja’s absolute meltdown over cleaning and kicked bins in the Bigg Boss house.

I mean, honestly. There really is nothing quite like screaming “this is DEMOCRACY MANIFEST” as you scrub your hands free of the lingering germs hanging on your hands.

But in all seriousness, please do wash your hands properly to help protect yourself and others.