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Comment by eu | Hacker News Reader

You can easily make it yourself: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Hand-Sanitizer

Yep it is silly for people to be hoarding hand sanitizer. A simple 70% alcohol solution would work just as well. That’s what we spray our gloves and biosafety hood with in the lab.

It doesn't have to be people "hoarding". It just has to be people buying faster than the just-in-time system has enough supply buffer to buffer for. If a very large demand spike drains the system of supply, then you're going to get at least one of high prices or shortages, and no rule against both.

If high demand persisted, the system would start producing more, but since we are fairly confident it won't, it becomes difficult for the producers to justify any additional capital outlay, limiting the rate at which they can spin up new supply.

Straight 70% alcohol without an emollient probably becomes pretty unpleasant rather quickly.

Yes, but what kind of alcohol? Grain alcohol is impractical because of the expense, isopropyl alcohol is likely to sell out quickly as well.

The only other option available to the public that comes to mind is denatured alcohol and it's unclear whether there any risks related to skin absorption of the denaturing agents. Anybody know?

One common denaturant is methanol which is probably not best to absorb on your skin.

It seems doubtful that all alcohol would become scarce and also all Everclear from the liquor store, which isn’t really that expensive in bulk (1.75L of 95% EtOH for ~$35). Certainly cheaper than $160 hand sanitizer.

For disinfecting surfaces at home, you certainly could use denatured alcohol, but diluted bleach is just as good and is dirt cheap.

For cleaning hands, soap and water is more effective than alcohol based sanitizers and also very inexpensive.

It doesn’t seem silly at all to have a stock of hand sanitizer. Quite the opposite - now that we know that hand sanitizer can easily run out, it seems rational to keep an emergency supply, if you have enough storage space and extra income to keep an emergency supply of things. I am going to add some to my emergency preparedness stash, once the current situation dies down and I can actually get some cheaply on amazon.

Sorry I should have phrased that better. I meant silly to be freaking out and buying $160 hand sanitizer when it is just alcohol and water and a thickening agent and a few other things.

Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I personally hadn't thought to look up how to make DIY hand sanitizer and found it interesting.

Anyways, the pitfall with this approach is that rubbing alcohol is also sold out. At the Target near me, every single bottle of it is gone, along with all the hand sanitizer, most of the flu medicine, and almost all the Ibuprofen.

> At the Target near me, every single bottle of it is gone

It's probably a local shortage. A few days ago, I had to fly to Washington DC and stopped at the Walgreens in downtown Chicago. They had tons of hand sanitizer in many container sizes; it wall all on sale - buy 1 get 1 for 50% off.

I read this article far more more seriously than any another r/disneyvacation post.

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