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The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

wired.com

121–130 of 310 posts

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#121
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Sometimes I wear a mask to keep the sun off my face or if there is a lot of pollen or dust outside.

Just curious to understand how does a mask over your mouth keep the sun off of your face (presumably the eyes)?

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#122
post #105

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 c…

Not "Everyone" was getting sick. An extremely small portion of the population getting sick can have a large impact, since most people are not sick, most of the time.

Depends where you were, and when. Probably almost everyone got sick in China after they dropped their zero-covid measures, in the space of a month or so. If you're sick for maybe 1-3 weeks, that's easily 1/3rd of the population sick simultaneously.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/ch...

> Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month.

> While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may make you feel comfortable to believe that's why they mask. But (knowing many people who still mask, under varying circumstances) -- that's not why they mask.

Why do they mask then? It seems a little hard to psychologically disentangle what one does for social approval vs for other reasons. For example, maybe it feels emotionally uncomfortable to not mask. Is it because the subconscious is worried about disease, or because the subconscious is worried about social approval? Probably some of both, but if we removed one perhaps the external behavior would change, hard to tell…

Given that the unmasked vastly outnumber the masked it's not for social approval. I still mask (N95) in places because I haven't been sick since 2019 and it makes me happy. There's very few people left who mask. The social pressure is very much to take off the mask.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#124
Anecdotal: I wash my hands more now after the Pandemic. Not that I have OCD, but it's been documented that many OCD sufferers had very strict parents who demanded their children washed their hands at every instance, and that passed into adulthood. Maybe I'm a victim of the Pandemic era and continue to wash my hands religiously, often to the extreme?

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#125
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In March, W.H.O. denied outright that Covid-19 was airborne, posting on social media, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” and calling it “misinformation.” We and our colleagues, scientists and engineers who have studied airborne particles for our entire careers, met with W.H.O. in April 2020 to express our concern that airborne transmission was important in the spread of COVID-19. W.H.O. vehemently rejected our sugges…

I think you and others in this thread are reading that tweet significantly out of context.

You don’t need to think too much, just go read the tweet. It’s pretty unequivocal. At that point the WHO was very adamantly against the idea that Covid could be airborne. That tweet thread is very strongly worded to emphasize that point.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#126

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 c…

This "hindsight" distraction can literally be used to excuse any mistake. It always involves completely dismissing a large group of experts who were right at the time, and for all the right reasons.

> how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball?

They certainly pretended that they knew hard enough to react in an extreme way.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#127
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original claim I responded to was that the medical establishment claimed airborne transmission was impossible. The WHO literally made a blanket statement that Covid was NOT airborne. > FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne. The CDC also denied airborne spread for quite some time. >As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization wer…

The 4-word tweet (from March 2020) is clearly an oversimplification for people who are only willing to read 4 words. They're talking about their (wrong) belief that airborne transmission was not a significant vector, at a population level . If you read charitably and look at their longer, contemporaneous statements, they say things like airborne spread is possible in some limited situations but not believed to be a s…

> clearly an oversimplification for people who are only willing to read 4 words

It’s a lie. There are no excuses. It’s false.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#128
post #61
post #53

Wow, this article really makes me feel like I dodged the bullet for our household when I realized that 95% (190 proof) Everclear was available for $35/1.75l I did the chemistry math and figured 3 parts Everclear:1 part water equalled 71.25% ethyl alcohol, within the recommended of the WHO. I even tried adding in food grade aloe to help not be as damaging on the skin (instead of water). Worked really well too. We didn…

Yeah, repurposing Everclear got me through the pandemic. I cut it with Diet Coke, and a splash of lime, and drank it to help sanitize my system of coronavirus particles. Kept me COVID-free. I think. I don’t really remember much of the past 3 years for some reason, drinking that every day…but no nagging cough!

How's your eyesight?

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#129
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original claim I responded to was that the medical establishment claimed airborne transmission was impossible. The WHO literally made a blanket statement that Covid was NOT airborne. > FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne. The CDC also denied airborne spread for quite some time. >As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization wer…

The 4-word tweet (from March 2020) is clearly an oversimplification for people who are only willing to read 4 words. They're talking about their (wrong) belief that airborne transmission was not a significant vector, at a population level . If you read charitably and look at their longer, contemporaneous statements, they say things like airborne spread is possible in some limited situations but not believed to be a s…

> The 4-word tweet (from March 2020) is clearly an oversimplification for people who are only willing to read 4 words.

I'm not sure why you would make such a misguided claim.

>Two years after the pandemic began, we finally have a good understanding of how COVID-19 is transmitted: some infected people exhale virus in small, invisible particles (aerosols). These do not fall quickly to the ground, but move in the air like cigarette smoke. Other people can get infected when breathing in those aerosols, either in close proximity, in shared room air, or less frequently, at a distance. But the journey to accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of how COVID-19 spread was far too slow and contentious. Even today, the updated guidance and policies of how to protect ourselves remain haphazardly applied

https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#130
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that amazing? Masking is a social phenomenon at this point. It's about showing other people what sort of person you are, not about the mask itself.

Is this a thing in red states and areas? Like masking as a "fuck you I'm different?" signal? Because around me in super-liberal-coastal-land practically nobody masks, and the ones I know personally who sometimes do have underlying reasons to be more cautious (e.g. relatives undergoing nasty cancer treatments and such that they don't want to spread anything to). It's been like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 people at the gym I g…

It's the opposite in red states. People harass strangers in public for wearing masks. Same vibe as the maskers in blue states. It's the never-maskers vs. the ever-maskers.
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