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The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

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Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#181

Post by FrustratedMonky »

gowld wrote: post #105
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #31

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.

Quarantine only works if it is put in place fast enough. At the time, other countries were showing 10% mortality. If that gets into circulation, there is no stopping it. So quarantine fast, to stop it. Not, wait and see, 'hmmm, some people seem to just get a cough, lets let this baby roll and see what happens'.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#182

Post by JPKab »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #31

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…

> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)"

There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself.

I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously".

As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this.

There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#183

Post by xyzzy123 »

roywiggins wrote: post #122
gowld wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Yes, I mean they had the option of pausing air traffic from Wuhan. Why wouldn't you?

Well of course it's not from China in any case.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#184

Post by FrustratedMonky »

JPKab wrote: post #182
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #31

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…

> "BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?)" There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even…

Yo Triggered. Maybe spring 2021.

Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'.

Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'.

Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#185

Post by oredbored »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #31

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…

Lol... it was known extremely early on that fomite transmission was practically unheard of. People were hand sanitizing for years after this. God knows why. The FDA still hasn't even declared hand sanitizer safe to use by the way.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#186

Post by hackernewds »

burnished wrote: post #77
perardi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yes, for me it turned out that I had already been practicing social distancing for some time and had gotten quite good at it. Cheap beer and video games helped me be a model citizen

A period of time where everyone was required to isolate indoors, and cover half their face outdoors really gave me an edge against my tall, fit and extroverted peers, and got me 3 accelerated promotions. Really cut their advantages down.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#187

Post by vkou »

pessimizer wrote: post #130
majormajor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been almost two years since I've started regularly going places in a 'lib' town, and I've yet to see any of the thousands of maskless people around me get harassed.

Just because there's like five videos of it happening back in 2021 on r/publicfreakouts doesn't mean it's a normal occurrence.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#188

Post by FrustratedMonky »

hedora wrote: post #143
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #31

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 has nothing to do with hindsight. We've known for decades that hand sanitizer (and antibiotic soap) kills off the beneficial bacteria on your hands, and also dries out skin, increasing the percentage of pathogens that survive contact with skin, and also increasing the percentage that manage to get past skins' protective barriers. We also knew that coronavirus was airborne well before 2019. The medical and microb…

So, am I re-reading your post correctly. That since we dealt with dozens of pandemics, we should what? Do nothing? or Wait to 'figure out which people' get sick, then react? But wouldn't people then already be getting sick and thus already too late to quarantine? This whole line of reasoning is based on 'hindsight', you're fantasizing about past decisions with current knowledge.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#189

Post by bluGill »

hammock wrote: post #134
raverbashing wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol > Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction No, it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice

>it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice You may find it interesting to learn the first national hand hygiene guidelines were not published until the 1980s

There was plenty of other hygiene guidelines before then. National things are easy to track, but tend to be late.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#190

Post by wewtyflakes »

slily wrote: post #114
wewtyflakes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are remembering things differently. I do not remember any consensus on these items within the first year of the pandemic. I remember things being uncertain. I think demanding vaccines for travel was reasonable, given the circumstances of the time. I do not think the mandates were pointless given what we knew at the time, and I think people who flouted them acted selfishly.

I can see how you'd get that impression if you followed the news through mainstream media and government spokespersons who stoked fear and uncertainty to push their recommendations, but I paid close attention to research and data, and there were countless instances of health authorities peddling obvious falsehoods, some of which I've already mentioned. I traveled freely internationally throughout 2020 before a blanke…

I think by definition, most people get their information from "mainstream" media. It also seems like hindsight is being applied here. We have perfect information now, and it seems that you are claiming that this whole time _you_ had perfect information/sources from the beginning. How could you expect that people could reasonably believe this? You also seem to be implying that there was some sort of sinister motive to get people to do things like get vaccinated and wear masks. I do not think that is credible; I think it is more likely that uncertainty was high, and it was reasonable to work with a high degree of caution. This belief doesn't require sinister intent, but it does paint people who worked against the grain as being selfish; that seems to track.
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