7 ms·

This 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

This 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)

wewtyflakes 3y ago
Can you elaborate on why you believe it was unproductive insanity?
- purpleflame1257 3y ago
  Because it was clear early on that covid was not droplet transmission and that hand santizer did jack shit. But nobody would acknowledge this for ages, leading to other crazy shit like shutdown playgrounds.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    It wasn't clear for months, but yes it did carry on too long.
  - danmaz74 3y ago
    It was very clear from where? https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#:~:text=Exposure%20occurs%20in%20three%20principal,hands%20that%20have%20been%20soiled https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
    - revelio 3y ago
      It was clear by March 2020 when the passengers on the Diamond Princess were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air; if transmission were droplet or surface based that would have ended the outbreak immediately. Please don't cite the CDC for anything, they're utterly discredited.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > they're utterly discredited. I see no reason to think that. Sure, mistakes were made (as is expected), but utterly discredited? That's a bit over the top.
        lesuorac 3y ago
        Not utterly discredited but definitely consider their press releases with the same amount of skepticism as a corporate press release. Like from now on, if they say "its not airborne" assume "it can transmit in the air" (i.e. droplets or by insects). If they say "there's no evidence of X" assume "We don't think X is false".
      - Scoundreller 3y ago
        > were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates. > This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarters that are poorly ventilated (e.g. elevators and public bathrooms). Doesn’t even require you to be in there at the same time if it can float around for a few hours. My (still valid) joke about the pandemic is to always be upwind of whomever you’re in contact with. 6’/2M apart didn’t matter.
        revelio 3y ago
        They weren't allowed out of their cabins iirc, so public bathrooms and elevators were not really relevant. It was almost certainly spreading through the ventilation system and possibly drainage systems.
    - slily 3y ago
      Obstinate appeal to authority to shut down dissenters is exactly how it took years for "The Science" to catch up to what had been obvious from the available data since 2020. From the masks to the social distancing, to denial of natural immunity and of vaccine side-effects. I agree with the sibling commentator - to anyone who was actually paying attention and considered the evidence from a variety of trustworthy sources, the CDC has been propagating false narratives the whole time and was absurdly slow to correct them, leading to plenty of awful, damaging policies.
      - wewtyflakes 3y ago
        When the unknowns were high, it seems reasonable that we would err on the side of caution, including using hand sanitizer. I do not see it as insanity, but rather a reasonable thing to do given the unknowns were high at the time.
        slily 3y ago
        There's some nuance there. The situation was not nearly as "unknown" as the CDC advocates would like to believe, and the international community provided plenty of evidence for individuals to make more informed decisions. Even early on, the number of case reports of people getting sick despite following recommended practices or not having any contact with potentially contaminated objects made the droplet thesis dubious. I don't recall ever seeing convincing evidence that COVID-19 could be transmitted through produce in grocery stores for example... yet for a while people were told to disinfect them before using, and many avoided restaurants due to the perceived risk of contaminated food. I'll give you that for vulnerable populations it might have made sense in the early days of the pandemic to follow the most neurotic guidelines in an abundance of caution, but again, it took government agencies far longer than necessary to update their recommendations. And let's not forget the flip-flopping about masks which contradicted the available data even at the time. The CDC was still peddling unproven and disproved claims as of last year at least, and that's how the United States was practically the last country on Earth to maintain pointless mandates, like vaccination for international travelers, far longer than even other countries that acted more aggressively prior like Canada and Australia. The CDC was quick to make imprudent recommendations that led to authoritarian policies, and slow to retract them when they were shown to be presumptuous, so as far as I'm concerned that's grounds enough to consider them "discredited", in the sense that I'll be skeptical of what they publish in the future instead of taking their recommendations at face value.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    > that hand santizer did jack shit. Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? If yes, then it is still very useful in a pandemic. If you have to go to the hospital because you're shitting your brains out from something else, then you are at insanely high right from catching covid.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      > Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? Do you have any information supporting this possibility? Because hand sanitizer also might have made children stronger and taller, but I don't think it did.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ >Hand sanitizers are more effective than plain soap and water alone in preventing transmission of bacteria from the hands of individuals. They play a significant role and could be an effective alternative to hand washing to achieve asepsis for all the health-care professionals in outreach program, water scarcity areas, and in routine clinical practice. Hence, stressing proper hand hygiene is an important first-line defense against the spread of multiple infectious diseases. Maybe looking up studies on this would be a good place to start... Of course I'm sure that there is a wide range of different answers on this that vary over a huge number of factors and illnesses in question.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      A lot of gastrointestinal viruses (hello norovirus) are non-enveloped viruses and survive alcohol sanitizers. And non-enveloped viruses (like Noro) aren’t easily inactivated by time and sunlight like other viruses (flu, corona). Makes me really worry about dependence on alcohol sanitizers when it’s the difficult to deactivate viruses that easily pass the stomach and cause you bigger issues.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    I wonder if it’s any clearer now that hand sanitizer does jack shit for every other respiratory virus too, like influenza. The “wash your hands” was a great way to blame victims for catching these diseases and push the liability to them. Easy to say to an employee “you got the flu because you didn’t wash your hands for 5 minutes” and disqualify their paid sick day. Much harder to blame them for… breathing at work. If we admit its airborne, then employees (and customers) have claims against the the business for work-acquired injuries.
- chaoticmass 3y ago
  With respect to covid, I remember it being said that washing your hands with soap was the most effective way to stop the virus spreading from physical contact. Yet the assumption that many people had was that alcohol based hand sanitizer was more effective. Sure, hand sanitizer is better than nothing, but old fashion soap and water was what the doctors recommended. Thats my guess anyway.
  - pers0n 3y ago
    You didn’t always have access to a place to wash your hands or soap. Many Native Americans don’t have running water and sanitizer was needed badly, when they asked the government to help they got sent body bags instead
    - f33d5173 3y ago
      Many people did have access to running water, and were buying up supply that plausibly could have been used by people who didn't.
  - ackfoobar 3y ago
    The heuristics that many people employ can be rather annoying. Another example regarding hand sanitizer: They used hand sanitizer after picking up and eating a cookie. And I was probably a weirdo for not doing so. Greasy fingers are a problem, and I guess they see hand sanitizer as a substitue for hand-washing. But hand sanitizer doesn't wash anything away.
- samstave 3y ago
  I=Funny I literally just wrote about this problem https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=36152239 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=361522... Basically - hand sanitzer fucks up your gut-biome and kills bacteria that is important for your immune system. STOP USING THEM. EAT DIRT - or you will be under dirt a lot faster.
jxramos 3y ago
what did he say / how did he react when you handed it back?
bipop5000 3y ago
I was thinking about all of the masks that were created super quickly and also dumped. Those masks do not look like they would recycle quickly.
- loeg 3y ago
  The cloth ones? They'll break down relatively quickly in landfills.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Are they actually natural fiber? The surgical masks mostly seem like plastic, and the softer cloth masks might be synthetic-cotton blends.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    The medical ones are not really cloth and contain synthetic materials.
    - loeg 3y ago
      Sure, but the context is industries and products quickly spun up in 2020. Those masks were basic cloth ones, not the surgical masks more common now.
      - giantg2 3y ago
        There was a huge production jump for N95s and surgical masks in 2020, included companies that spun up and shipped potentially dangerous products (N95s by unheard of companies not actually being N95 compliant). Their usage is still up compared to pre-pandemic levels.
        loeg 3y ago
        Ok? You can look at my original comment -- I'm talking about cloth ones. I'm not interested in arguing with you about the relative proportion of cloth masks and synthetic masks.
commandlinefan 3y ago
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.
- sithadmin 3y ago
  I've never encountered a hand sanitizer with antibiotics in it. They're alcohol-based, and kill bacteria by destroying their cellular membrane and screwing up proteins inside organisms that absorb it. They're not going to cause antibiotic resistance.
  - bourgoin 3y ago
    There have existed hand sanitizer formulations containing Triclosan or BZK instead of alcohol, although those compounds are more commonly used in anti-bacterial soaps. Triclosan was particularly controversial because of its potential to cause antibiotic resistance and also for being an endocrine disruptor. During the second half of the last decade, its usage was widely restricted by regulatory agencies and it was phased out of a ton of consumer products.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  Washing your hands after being in a public place is fine, you're not going to create antibiotic resistance with simple hygiene. If you're using hand sanitizer dozens of times a day that's a different story (mostly because it's going to do a number on your skin).
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  Proper sanitizer - e.g. alcohol with ~70% concentration - is as close to "resistance-proof" as is possible. There's never been any indication of adaptations at that level, it's just too destructive to bacterial cells. Avoid the "alcohol-free" sanitizers since they rely on other chemicals to achieve the same effect but go crazy with the alcohol-based ones.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
moffkalast 3y ago
The unsterilized masses, they cannot make the judgement call.

wewtyflakes 3y ago

Can you elaborate on why you believe it was unproductive insanity?

purpleflame1257 3y ago
Because it was clear early on that covid was not droplet transmission and that hand santizer did jack shit. But nobody would acknowledge this for ages, leading to other crazy shit like shutdown playgrounds.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  It wasn't clear for months, but yes it did carry on too long.
- danmaz74 3y ago
  It was very clear from where? https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#:~:text=Exposure%20occurs%20in%20three%20principal,hands%20that%20have%20been%20soiled https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
  - revelio 3y ago
    It was clear by March 2020 when the passengers on the Diamond Princess were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air; if transmission were droplet or surface based that would have ended the outbreak immediately. Please don't cite the CDC for anything, they're utterly discredited.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > they're utterly discredited. I see no reason to think that. Sure, mistakes were made (as is expected), but utterly discredited? That's a bit over the top.
      - lesuorac 3y ago
        Not utterly discredited but definitely consider their press releases with the same amount of skepticism as a corporate press release. Like from now on, if they say "its not airborne" assume "it can transmit in the air" (i.e. droplets or by insects). If they say "there's no evidence of X" assume "We don't think X is false".
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      > were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates. > This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarters that are poorly ventilated (e.g. elevators and public bathrooms). Doesn’t even require you to be in there at the same time if it can float around for a few hours. My (still valid) joke about the pandemic is to always be upwind of whomever you’re in contact with. 6’/2M apart didn’t matter.
      - revelio 3y ago
        They weren't allowed out of their cabins iirc, so public bathrooms and elevators were not really relevant. It was almost certainly spreading through the ventilation system and possibly drainage systems.
  - slily 3y ago
    Obstinate appeal to authority to shut down dissenters is exactly how it took years for "The Science" to catch up to what had been obvious from the available data since 2020. From the masks to the social distancing, to denial of natural immunity and of vaccine side-effects. I agree with the sibling commentator - to anyone who was actually paying attention and considered the evidence from a variety of trustworthy sources, the CDC has been propagating false narratives the whole time and was absurdly slow to correct them, leading to plenty of awful, damaging policies.
    - wewtyflakes 3y ago
      When the unknowns were high, it seems reasonable that we would err on the side of caution, including using hand sanitizer. I do not see it as insanity, but rather a reasonable thing to do given the unknowns were high at the time.
      - slily 3y ago
        There's some nuance there. The situation was not nearly as "unknown" as the CDC advocates would like to believe, and the international community provided plenty of evidence for individuals to make more informed decisions. Even early on, the number of case reports of people getting sick despite following recommended practices or not having any contact with potentially contaminated objects made the droplet thesis dubious. I don't recall ever seeing convincing evidence that COVID-19 could be transmitted through produce in grocery stores for example... yet for a while people were told to disinfect them before using, and many avoided restaurants due to the perceived risk of contaminated food. I'll give you that for vulnerable populations it might have made sense in the early days of the pandemic to follow the most neurotic guidelines in an abundance of caution, but again, it took government agencies far longer than necessary to update their recommendations. And let's not forget the flip-flopping about masks which contradicted the available data even at the time. The CDC was still peddling unproven and disproved claims as of last year at least, and that's how the United States was practically the last country on Earth to maintain pointless mandates, like vaccination for international travelers, far longer than even other countries that acted more aggressively prior like Canada and Australia. The CDC was quick to make imprudent recommendations that led to authoritarian policies, and slow to retract them when they were shown to be presumptuous, so as far as I'm concerned that's grounds enough to consider them "discredited", in the sense that I'll be skeptical of what they publish in the future instead of taking their recommendations at face value.
- pixl97 3y ago
  > that hand santizer did jack shit. Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? If yes, then it is still very useful in a pandemic. If you have to go to the hospital because you're shitting your brains out from something else, then you are at insanely high right from catching covid.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? Do you have any information supporting this possibility? Because hand sanitizer also might have made children stronger and taller, but I don't think it did.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ >Hand sanitizers are more effective than plain soap and water alone in preventing transmission of bacteria from the hands of individuals. They play a significant role and could be an effective alternative to hand washing to achieve asepsis for all the health-care professionals in outreach program, water scarcity areas, and in routine clinical practice. Hence, stressing proper hand hygiene is an important first-line defense against the spread of multiple infectious diseases. Maybe looking up studies on this would be a good place to start... Of course I'm sure that there is a wide range of different answers on this that vary over a huge number of factors and illnesses in question.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    A lot of gastrointestinal viruses (hello norovirus) are non-enveloped viruses and survive alcohol sanitizers. And non-enveloped viruses (like Noro) aren’t easily inactivated by time and sunlight like other viruses (flu, corona). Makes me really worry about dependence on alcohol sanitizers when it’s the difficult to deactivate viruses that easily pass the stomach and cause you bigger issues.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  I wonder if it’s any clearer now that hand sanitizer does jack shit for every other respiratory virus too, like influenza. The “wash your hands” was a great way to blame victims for catching these diseases and push the liability to them. Easy to say to an employee “you got the flu because you didn’t wash your hands for 5 minutes” and disqualify their paid sick day. Much harder to blame them for… breathing at work. If we admit its airborne, then employees (and customers) have claims against the the business for work-acquired injuries.
chaoticmass 3y ago
With respect to covid, I remember it being said that washing your hands with soap was the most effective way to stop the virus spreading from physical contact. Yet the assumption that many people had was that alcohol based hand sanitizer was more effective. Sure, hand sanitizer is better than nothing, but old fashion soap and water was what the doctors recommended. Thats my guess anyway.
- pers0n 3y ago
  You didn’t always have access to a place to wash your hands or soap. Many Native Americans don’t have running water and sanitizer was needed badly, when they asked the government to help they got sent body bags instead
  - f33d5173 3y ago
    Many people did have access to running water, and were buying up supply that plausibly could have been used by people who didn't.
- ackfoobar 3y ago
  The heuristics that many people employ can be rather annoying. Another example regarding hand sanitizer: They used hand sanitizer after picking up and eating a cookie. And I was probably a weirdo for not doing so. Greasy fingers are a problem, and I guess they see hand sanitizer as a substitue for hand-washing. But hand sanitizer doesn't wash anything away.
samstave 3y ago
I=Funny I literally just wrote about this problem https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=36152239 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=361522... Basically - hand sanitzer fucks up your gut-biome and kills bacteria that is important for your immune system. STOP USING THEM. EAT DIRT - or you will be under dirt a lot faster.

jxramos 3y ago

what did he say / how did he react when you handed it back?

bipop5000 3y ago

I was thinking about all of the masks that were created super quickly and also dumped. Those masks do not look like they would recycle quickly.

loeg 3y ago
The cloth ones? They'll break down relatively quickly in landfills.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Are they actually natural fiber? The surgical masks mostly seem like plastic, and the softer cloth masks might be synthetic-cotton blends.
- giantg2 3y ago
  The medical ones are not really cloth and contain synthetic materials.
  - loeg 3y ago
    Sure, but the context is industries and products quickly spun up in 2020. Those masks were basic cloth ones, not the surgical masks more common now.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      There was a huge production jump for N95s and surgical masks in 2020, included companies that spun up and shipped potentially dangerous products (N95s by unheard of companies not actually being N95 compliant). Their usage is still up compared to pre-pandemic levels.
      - loeg 3y ago
        Ok? You can look at my original comment -- I'm talking about cloth ones. I'm not interested in arguing with you about the relative proportion of cloth masks and synthetic masks.

commandlinefan 3y ago

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.

sithadmin 3y ago
I've never encountered a hand sanitizer with antibiotics in it. They're alcohol-based, and kill bacteria by destroying their cellular membrane and screwing up proteins inside organisms that absorb it. They're not going to cause antibiotic resistance.
- bourgoin 3y ago
  There have existed hand sanitizer formulations containing Triclosan or BZK instead of alcohol, although those compounds are more commonly used in anti-bacterial soaps. Triclosan was particularly controversial because of its potential to cause antibiotic resistance and also for being an endocrine disruptor. During the second half of the last decade, its usage was widely restricted by regulatory agencies and it was phased out of a ton of consumer products.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
Washing your hands after being in a public place is fine, you're not going to create antibiotic resistance with simple hygiene. If you're using hand sanitizer dozens of times a day that's a different story (mostly because it's going to do a number on your skin).
mikeyouse 3y ago
Proper sanitizer - e.g. alcohol with ~70% concentration - is as close to "resistance-proof" as is possible. There's never been any indication of adaptations at that level, it's just too destructive to bacterial cells. Avoid the "alcohol-free" sanitizers since they rely on other chemicals to achieve the same effect but go crazy with the alcohol-based ones.
dabluecaboose 3y ago

moffkalast 3y ago

The unsterilized masses, they cannot make the judgement call.