Even not in a pandemic, the grocery store thing especially makes sense. You'll be touching products that will make it into somebody else's mouth. (Hopefully with a wash in between, but you never know.)
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.
Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.