In all of these posts there is a strong 'what were they thinking' reaction. - remember hindsight. At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick, who a the time could say 'yeah, people are dying, but YOLO, no need to sanitize your hands.'
Lot of freaking armchair quarterbacks in the 'lets criticize the medical community' co-hort.
The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
31–40 of 310 posts
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#32This hand sanitizer everywhere thing was just one of the many unproductive insanities of the Covid era. Quick story: In 2021 I was shopping at an Office Max in Florida. At the counter, the checkout guy snuck two small bottles into my bag. Me: Wait! I didn't buy that! Him: Don't worry, it's free. Me: Ok, but what is it? Him: Hand sanitizer, we're giving them away. Me: (Takes bottles out of bag, hands back to him)
I worry about overuse of hand sanitizer creating antibiotic resistant "superbugs" as we've been told for decades... but I sure as hell can't go to a gas station or a grocery store without washing my hands with hand sanitizer any more. I feel like I can see the germs now.
I thought that it wasn't possible for pathogens to develop resistance to alcohol based sanitizers, but apparently I was wrong.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115
Not the same phenomena as antibiotic resistance, which is a bigger problem, but apparently this is a thing.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking back, it was crazy how much emphasis was placed on surface transmission. I remember people talking about wiping down grocery boxes left in front of their door with hand sanitizer and leaving it to sit for 72 hours before bringing it inside.
Man, I live in the Bay Area, and my neighbors still do this shit .
I saw someone driving alone in their car wearing a mask two days ago. I live in Kansas.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#34This hand sanitizer everywhere thing was just one of the many unproductive insanities of the Covid era. Quick story: In 2021 I was shopping at an Office Max in Florida. At the counter, the checkout guy snuck two small bottles into my bag. Me: Wait! I didn't buy that! Him: Don't worry, it's free. Me: Ok, but what is it? Him: Hand sanitizer, we're giving them away. Me: (Takes bottles out of bag, hands back to him)
I worry about overuse of hand sanitizer creating antibiotic resistant "superbugs" as we've been told for decades... but I sure as hell can't go to a gas station or a grocery store without washing my hands with hand sanitizer any more. I feel like I can see the germs now.
Since you’ve adopted the practice, do you notice yourself getting sick less?
I don’t use sanitizer especially often, but I’ve definitely noticed a general, society-wide uptick in being cognizant of germs and cleanliness. I don’t have any figures to back it up, though I’d be curious to see them if they exist, but I definitely notice myself getting sick (cold or flu) _way_ less often, in fact, I think it’s just been once since the pandemic began. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but I think a lot of the habits we picked up during Covid will serve us positively in the future as well.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I live in the Bay Area, and my neighbors still do this shit .
I saw someone driving alone in their car wearing a mask two days ago. I live in Kansas.
Oh that's daily around here still. Absolutely baffling to me, I could handle wearing a mask when I needed to but you bet your ass I was removing it as soon as I got outside because it's really quite unpleasant.
I've got a neighbor who wears a mask to move his trash can the 20 feet from the inside of his garage to the pavement just outside. He also wears the mask when driving alone in his car.
COVID definitely broke some brains.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#36This hand sanitizer everywhere thing was just one of the many unproductive insanities of the Covid era. Quick story: In 2021 I was shopping at an Office Max in Florida. At the counter, the checkout guy snuck two small bottles into my bag. Me: Wait! I didn't buy that! Him: Don't worry, it's free. Me: Ok, but what is it? Him: Hand sanitizer, we're giving them away. Me: (Takes bottles out of bag, hands back to him)
The unsterilized masses, they cannot make the judgement call.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#37Interesting that everyone is talking in past tense in this thread. Where I live hand sanitiser is still everywhere and people still use it all the time. I don't recall ever seeing it outside of hospitals prior to the pandemic.
I still use them (and masks). I haven't had a cold, the flu or any of the usual seasonal sicknesses in 3 years, and this spring my pollen allergy was nowhere to be seen. My quality of life is significantly better ever since I started using them. Washing my hands for 30 seconds at least also helps.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking back, it was crazy how much emphasis was placed on surface transmission. I remember people talking about wiping down grocery boxes left in front of their door with hand sanitizer and leaving it to sit for 72 hours before bringing it inside.
Man, I live in the Bay Area, and my neighbors still do this shit .
Not sure what the Bay Area has to do with this. I never considered doing that kind of thing but I am still masking when around other people. I'm currently traveling and still see plenty of others doing the same.
Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#39Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
#40> What happened next is a lesson about leaving disaster response to the whims of capitalism.
Companies did exactly what the government wanted them to do: make hand sanitizer as fast as possible and at massive scale. The lesson here is about leaving disaster response to governments. The FDA had a bunch of tactics it could have used. It could have continued to do inspections and changed the rules to say if you don't pass you have to display a notice of that prominently on the bottle. It could have kept the rules and just let companies scale up within the limits.
Or most obviously, it could have bothered double-checking and realized that hand sanitizer wasn't going to do anything about a virus that spreads via cloud-like aerosols. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 spread this way was widely known to independent skeptics by the time the company in the article was applying for permission to make sanitizer. What happened on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrated that the virus must be spreading through air ducts, rendering lockdowns, hand sanitizers and masks all useless. It was also expected because SARS-1 spread this way too, and because masks had never had an impact on respiratory illness before either.
All this was ignored because the medical establishment didn't know what to do if this fact was recognized. They preferred to tell people to engage in pointless and self-destructive behavior rather than say, ok, maybe there's nothing we can do except let doctors get on with it.
This aerosol denial was never formally ended and so large parts of the population is still unable to process reality even today, especially in academia and healthcare. Instead they invent ever more bizarre and desperate attempts to try and explain the abject failures of all these mitigations.