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Comment by hooloovoo_zoo | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the silliness of this fee, wasn't regular soap more effective and always widely available? Was there any real reason to make emergency sanitizer?

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There are situations where a sink and soap are not always readily available. Like... in my car after a trip to the store. Out in public, and you just touched a few too many shared use things like handrails. Pull out the bottle. Demand for this flexibility and hand cleansing has skyrocketed.

Sanitizer is much more convenient if you don't have access to a sink. Also, stores did run out of soap due to panic buying.

I'm glad whenever we stock up in prep for a hurricane we aren't accused of panic buying. Maybe that's still to come.

I prefer the German "Hamsterkauf" (lit. "hamster buying") which feels a lot less judgy

Both regular hand washing and hand sanitizer are effective. Each can be used in different places, which makes them both useful. For example, I sanitize my hands in the car after going to the grocery store. Hard to make soap and water work for that case.

The way I heard it, sanitizer seems to work (and is usable anywhere), but soap followed by running water has an advantage in not only breaking up the fatty layer protecting a coronavirus, but also sweeping it off your skin.

SARS-CoV-2 needs that outer shell to be able to infect you.

Lab tests have found that even when hand sanitizer is diluted well below recommended levels of concentration, it's still very effective at inactivating SARS-CoV-2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431409/

It's a relatively fragile virus. Fact is, there's very little evidence of COVID-19 spreading via surfaces, so hand hygiene and surface cleaning probably makes little if any difference: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

With some diseases surfaces certainly can be a common source of infection. But COVID-19 doesn't appear to be one of them.

Sanitizer is always first choice in hospital settings. It’s MUCH faster, and MUCH easier on the skin over repeated use than soap and water.

Hand Sanitizer, with alcohol, is far more damaging to your skin than soap.

Regular soap was hard to find near me, though I was near a hotspot.

I wasn't in a hotspot and hand soap has been hard to get all year.

Supplies sometimes were lower than usual but there has consistently been enough on hand to meet our needs - in my case unscented.

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