It's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.
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.