Live data from Hacker News

The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

wired.com

191–200 of 310 posts

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#191

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…

You'd think that the regulations that were suspended were not invented in response to nothing.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why do they mask then? Disposable/cloth masks that do absolutely nothing to prevent the spread of an airborne disease like Covid do still work with diseases (like the Flu) with a droplet based spread. > CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona... The problem was the cult of people claiming that a disposable/cloth mask could be effectiv…

Not "absolutely nothing", according to research I've seen. Just not very much.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#193
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 o…

Maybe a problem less controversial was the absence of trusted public health figures making concerted efforts to calm fears. And those that did try were belittled, minimized and castigated. They were the ones labeled as dangerous.

Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Would be interested to see a source showing a guideline of wiping down surfaces from hundreds of years ago

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#196
Will the $12 million dollar fine even cover what it cost the city to house thousands in motels for 3 months?

$200/night * 1000 = $200,000/day, 1.4 million bucks a week per thousand people.

Times 9 weeks... That's around $40 million minimum for 3k people.

Externalities are nasty.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#197

Just one aspect of the huge, tragicomic waste that resulted from the medical establishment's position that airborne transmission couldn't be real because it reminded everyone too much of miasma theory. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13070

Seems like an excessively speculative theory when the alternative, "SARS1 infections were overwhelmingly driven by droplet spread and SARS-COV 2 is a close relative so we expect it to behave similarly" is right there..

That's not correct, at least in hospitals and apartment buildings there was pretty good evidence that SARS was airborne, at least over short distances. Yes, I mean actually airborne, not ballistic droplets. I'm not thinking "yeah sure I knew that" in hindsight like people quite often do, this is from research I did in 2018. I wore P100 elastomeric respirators from the start of the pandemic, I didn't question for a second that it was airborne.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#198
post #33
post #21

Earlier 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.

I used to do that when I masked because when I took the mask off, my facial hair would get activated and itchy. So if I weren't at a place where I could wash my hands, I just kept the mask on as it was easier to keep my hands off my face that way.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#199

> Several fires involving large amounts of unsellable hand sanitizer have broken out across the country in the past year, from Dallas to downtown Los Angeles. It's not quite clear why there have been so many fires, especially when we've been making and storing and shipping hand sanitizer in warehouses for a long time. Is it: 1) Something about these new companies wasn't following safety protocols, because they were n…

This seems suggestive... isn't it likely that some of the contaminants they let slide were more combustible?

> On March 20, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing its regulations on hand sanitizer to “provide flexibility to help meet demand during this outbreak.” Those regulations, known as the Current Good Manufacturing Practices, had been in place since 1994 and included regularly updated rules on everything from record-keeping to product testing to packaging. The agency also paused the requirement under the Federal Food Drug & Cosmetics Act that sanitizer be sourced from pharmaceutical-grade ethanol, which is free of industrial toxins that are commonly found in fuel-grade ethanol. Businesses were still expected to test their sanitizers for benzene and other toxic compounds, but essentially on an honor system. The FDA noted that it did “not intend to take action against firms” for violations during the public health emergency.

> [...]

> By mid-June the FDA had received so many complaints that it started compiling an online list of “hand sanitizers consumers should not use.” Because the agency does not have recall authority for over-the-counter drugs, the offending companies themselves were expected to pull products marked as unsafe. Consumers had to go out of their way to find the list and stay up to date as it got longer and longer. By the end of that first pandemic summer, nearly 200 types of sanitizer appeared on the list.

> ArtNaturals was, at that point, not on the list. Its sanitizer, labeled with a tasteful, millennial-friendly design that said it was vegan and infused with jojoba oil, was marketed as “safe for kids” and “a great bulk hand sanitizer pack for parents and teachers.” At least two school districts on the West Coast had purchased the sanitizer to distribute to students, in addition to two Ivy League universities. Then, in March 2021, a year into sales, an independent lab in Connecticut called Valisure announced that it had found benzene in the company’s sanitizer. Benzene, a widely used industrial chemical derived from petroleum, can be absorbed through the skin and is known to be a risk factor for leukemia.

Then again, intentional destruction is certainly a possibility too.

Re: The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom

#200

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…

We knew very early on that plain soap and water were very effective at killing coronavirus (and much, much more so than alcohol gel hand sanitizer). It was even official advice here in the UK to use soap and water instead of alcohol gel for hand washing if at all possible I think. Yet many people still seemed to think the exact opposite. They still have it alongside soap in my office bathrooms for example. It makes a very interesting social study.
Post reply on HN