My biggest concern when I read this—perhaps unnecessarily—is how do I know if the sanitizer dispenser at $random_grocery_store is safe? A lot of stores require that you use those upon entry (for perfectly well-intentioned reasons).
These sanitizers are supposed to be mostly ethyl or isopropyl alcohol, around 70%.
So, supposing conservatively, if all of the alcohol is methanol instead, and you absorb all of it, about 3 cc's should be your maximum daily limit from such a dispenser.
Of course, most of the alcohol will be lost to evaporation instead of absorbed, thus I think a few small squirts here and there shouldn't hurt you - as long as you aren't drinking it.
“Although all persons using these products on their hands are at risk for methanol poisoning, young children who accidently ingest these products and adolescents and adults who drink these products as an alcohol (ethanol) substitute, are most at risk.”
I would be more concerned if your using hand sanitizer 10+ times a day, but a single use from a random store is almost certainly harmless.
Is this actually a thing? None of the stores I’ve been to require you to use it.
Source?
Last I saw, there was 48 hr+ viral persistence on plastic and steel. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...
A single virus probably can cause infection, but it appears not to be anywhere near a linear correlation between dose and risk. And severity can be tied to initial dose, too.
This is one interesting thing about masks: they may do more to improve prognosis than reduce infection.
Further, when we're talking about ... e.g virus on cardboard... the way you do the test is after the droplet on the cardboard has dried, you use a buffer to dissolve the virus back out of the cardboard and see if you can grow it in culture. This may recover virus in cases where there's absolutely no chance for casual contact to get it out.
This remains a known unknown, and asserting a conclusion in either direction at this time is a victory of emotion over knowledge.
I somehow failed to take that statement to heart.
There have been repeated claims that we haven't detected surface transmission - but ruling out fomite transmission in a droplet-transmitted disease such as this is a joke. The best you can do is rule out fomite transmission after long periods of time. Which is fine for something like "do I have to worry about my amazon package's contents, which hasn't been touched by human hands in at least 24 hours?" but not in a scenario like the OP's, where a high traffic area like a store means you can have surface contact within minutes of contamination.
The most conservative papers I've seen regarding surface transmission consider the safe period 'after a couple of hours', which is not the threat model of OP's post.
I haven't personally encountered a store where hand-sanitizer use is required, but I usually wear a pair of nitrile gloves anyway, so I guess this is another reason to continue to do that.
edit: I find it amusing that people are downvoting me for saying "ethnicity". As if I'm privileged and looking down on some ethnicity.
I'm of that ethnicity, you dolts. I thought I made that clear with the $ sign, following on the OP's use of it. But I guess that was too subtle.
your readers may not be the same race as you. maybe to them "different less-trustworthy ethnicity" is white.
or maybe you only wanted to talk to other white people so you could reconfirm to yourselves that "ethnic" cultures are "backwards" and "exotic" and "less trustworthy."
Just trying it out for myself: "My $k-wheeled car in San Francisco is much better than public transit", I automatically read that the number of wheels as having some importance and also assume that the number of wheels is not 4.
Of course, this may seem unusual in that k is a free variable and I may be implying that it doesn't matter what its value is, but it doesn't read that way.
I think this comes from a natural form of information compression. Very cool.
Another fun example of implicit information is: "They met on the streets of San Francisco. She was homeless and he was homeless and dirty." Does this imply that she wasn't dirty? Yes. But that's actually unknown.
It's unsafe to assume everyone is exposed to the same amount of this.
I also imagine a store employee wouldn't balk at you using your own sanitizer instead. Or even notice if you pretended to use it.
Edit: I missed the idea that these products have unintentional, and undocumented, methanol in them. Note that some hand sanitizers intentionally have methanol in them, and it's listed. Those, at least, are easy to avoid.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...