Anecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.
Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
It has not been shown to decrease disease transmission, and there’s good reason to think it increases disease transmission by letting oozy stuff pass in and out of skin.
Put another way, would you rather eat:
- whatever microbes are on a stranger’s hand (probably picked up at the store, and mostly non-pathogenic)
- or whatever toxins are in the hand sanitizer, along with whatever bodily fluids seeped out of said stranger’s dry, cracked skin?
Covid might change the tradeoff a bit, but I’m skeptical.