Throw gloves in the trash, Franklin Square residents say

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Sandra Fuschetto’s young children like to pick up things they find on the ground.

Once, Fuschetto said, her daughter found a used bus ticket and pretended it was a credit card. The 8-year-old also likes to inflate gloves to make puppets, like she has seen some of her doctors do to entertain her.

But now Fuschetto worries about her daughter, after seeing surgical gloves strewn across the parking lot of the Western Beef Supermarket in Elmont. 

“I’m constantly saying, ‘Oh my God, don’t pick that up. You don’t know what germs are on it,’” Fuschetto said. “I’m frantic with her now.”

She is worried about the spread of COVID-19, she said, and fears the virus may be on the gloves in the parking lot. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the virus can survive on plastics for several hours.

“If people are so concerned about the virus that they feel the need to wear gloves,” Franklin Square resident Nicole Zegarek said, “they should be just as concerned about disposing of them properly.”

Instead, however, there are gloves littered in the parking lots of Western Beef Supermarket, Stop & Shop, Walgreens and CVS.

But the gloves are not just in the parking lots, Zegarek said. She and her children found six latex gloves in a three-block area around the Washington Street School last week, she said, and thought about getting her own gloves to clean them up, “but that thought came and went when I thought about how long we’ve been quarantining in our house and the steps we are taking to make sure everything is as clean and germ-free as possible.”

So instead, she said, she spoke to her children about the dangers of throwing gloves on the ground, not only because the gloves could spread the coronavirus, but also because “we need to take care of our environment if we want our environment to take care of us.”