In the May issue of the JHI we are pleased to present our annual Special Section on Hand Hygiene to mark the World Health Organization’s SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign, this year on the theme of ‘seconds save lives’. The issue is led by an editorial from the JHI Editors: ‘Hand Hygiene: a COVID Beneficiary?’ and features work from Huang et al. on COVID-19 and behavioural changes in healthcare workers towards hand hygiene, Campos et al. on SARS-CoV-2 decontamination of skin with disinfectants active during and after application, and a systematic review from Clancy et al. on hand-hygiene-related trials reported between 2014 and 2020. We feature a short section on Water Systems, including an editorial from Weinbren and Inkster entitled ‘The hospital-built environment: biofilm, biodiversity and bias’, and two articles from Inkster et al., ‘Investigation and control of an outbreak due to a contaminated hospital water system, identified following a rare case of Cupriavidus pauculus bacteraemia’ and ‘Water springing to life the fungal desert’. Other papers featured in the May edition include work on COVID-19 outbreaks in care homes during the first wave from Tulloch et al. and an investigation of intra-hospital SARS-CoV-2 transmission using nanopore whole-genome sequencing from Løvestad et al.