The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
wired.com
wired.com
Instead, 6 months in when we knew it was transmitted through air, we continued to make businesses sanitize their checkouts while people walked around in ineffective cloth masks.
Really fucked the dog there.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ont...
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081
Then, get this, a few years later, they needed them!
Best part was I already worked at an organization that required mask fitting for all employees, but when the pandemic hit that this was in preparation for, everybody wanted them and there weren’t any available.
Keep in mind the disease was already all over the world when it was discovered.
Obviously, there's a preparedness issue which is probably the base root of that issue, but early enthusiastic masking instead of trying to send all the construction workers home probably would have gone a lot farther.
Wut
But at what cost? We knew that benzene is toxic. Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction than a rational one, IMO.
> Wiping down every surface with a toxic chemical without knowing if it even helps against covid is much more of an emotional/fearful reaction
No, it is a reaction grounded in the last hundreds of year of proper hygiene practice
You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know.
We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol.
In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to put benzene in hand sanitizer" and "Everyone should constantly disinfect with hand sanitizer" was not a good move.
I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start again and people refuse to do the most basic things (yes, some of them obviously nonsense and some of them perhaps in hindsight) and the conspiracy theories spreading and everybody being a hobby virologist, and when we realize that a significant fraction of us will die and society will collapse and we could have prevented it but now it's too late. Then it won't help me anymore to say "told you so". But at least society will deserve its collapse.
I think you're really underplaying this. If the FDA hadn't suspended the rules about benzene, then fine. No biggy.
But the government literally encouraged people to slather themselves with carcinogens on a hunch that it might help with COVID.
I would even be fine with it if we had proof that hand sanitizer was the most effective way to stop COVID, and then the FDA relaxed the regulations secure in the knowledge that it would save lives.
But COVID is airborne, hand sanitizer does basically nothing to protect against it, and people are going to die from leukemia as a result of all this for no reason.
And we won't have time for waiting for proof that it does or doesn't work. Of course in hindsight everybody is smart. But when the big one hits, there is no time for hindsight. By then we're all dead (or deep into a civil war).
Start with cautious. Adjust/relax rules when knowledge becomes available. Sanitizing your hands and wearing masks are the obvious immediate solution.
You make it sound like all companies suddenly poured toxic waste over the population, ordered by the government. Maybe it's not the government that was exaggerating here.
You may find it interesting to learn the first national hand hygiene guidelines were not published until the 1980s
You will find biblical references to hand washing dating back several thousands years, but i'm not sure you count that
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/15/world/asia/ch...
> Based on that data, they inferred that 90 percent of the population was infected in little more than a month.
> While the figure is high, epidemiologists who were not involved with the project said such a rate was plausible. And in January, a leading government epidemiologist said on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, that 80 percent of the population had been infected. Some European companies’ operations in China saw infection rates of 90 percent among their employees in December, Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told The Times in an interview.
Well of course it's not from China in any case.
> how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball?
They certainly pretended that they knew hard enough to react in an extreme way.
Huh? Like 1 in 10 people that caught the virus died? Where do you think this happened?
This may have been true for very tiny portions of the pouplation, like people over the age of 90 (who had a 20% ifr according to https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) but otherwise the country with the highest ifr seems to be portugal at 2%, and even that would have been heavily concentrated in those who were at risk of death from just about anything due to age and comorbidities.
We've known for decades that hand sanitizer (and antibiotic soap) kills off the beneficial bacteria on your hands, and also dries out skin, increasing the percentage of pathogens that survive contact with skin, and also increasing the percentage that manage to get past skins' protective barriers.
We also knew that coronavirus was airborne well before 2019.
The medical and microbiology/virology communities provided advice that was the exact opposite of what the epidemiologists suggested, and were ignored.
Epidemiologies are closer to being historians or sociologists than doctors, so letting them run the show made no sense, and, in hindsight, what was obvious at the time turned out to be correct. The lockdowns were absurdly expensive, created massive secondary public health problems, and didn't save as many people as the approach dictated by conventional wisdom would have.
Conventional wisdom said we should figure out which people were most vulnerable (the elderly, obese and people with chronic medical conditions), and aggressively quarantine just them. That would allow covid to spread through the rest of the population in a month or two, and wouldn't require the entire economy to shut down. Instead, something like 5% of the workforce would call in sick for a month or two.
At this point, the excess mortality from the pandemic is above the expected mortality rate for low risk groups, so, in hindsight, we now know for sure that we should have listened to the medical community, and the findings of the (now retired) epidemiologists that studied the last pandemic.
Having more supporting evidence now doesn't change the fact that all of this was obvious at the beginning of the pandemic, but that it was ignored / actively censored by our leaders.
Anyway, at the end of the day, covid is a strain of the common cold, not some crazy alien pathogen that we have zero experience with. Also, humans have dealt with dozens of pandemics during recorded history. The whole "this was a brand new thing we had no experience with" argument just doesn't hold water.
Right from wiki, this sure sounds like Epidemiologist are the ones to make the call. : Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]
The same would happen in the technical community if there were a breach and procedures were ignored and made up based on hunches. The medical community does not get a pass.
:: Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
In hindsight, we had vaccines created and in testing 5 days [1] after the WHO called that virus a pandemic [2].
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5
[2]: https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments...
If you can manufacture a vaccine that you cannot sell then you have wasted production space. Like the trials had a pre-determined duration so if you know the trial ends in August and you know it takes 1 month to staff up the production line then at the end of June check the preliminary data and make a call to staff up the factory in anticipation of the trial succeeding.
But in order for the vaccines to be in a trial (testing) by March they had to have already been in development before March, I suspect a lot of these companies decided in like January/February to start staffing people to work on a vaccine; how and why would that have been faster if those federal people weren't fired?
That, of course was not clearly communicated, like everything else. So the OP's confusion of very small batches with industrial manufacture was excusable, but he is complaining about a wrong thing.
There is a strong "what were they thinking" behind this because we found out very early on that this virus didn't spread on surfaces, by spring 2020. But the public health apparatus found that keeping people as fearful as possible (even for irrational reasons) was useful for getting them to follow their guidelines. Double bonus for highly visible, borderline superstitious rituals like hand sanitizer, which helped identify those who were compliant from the dissidents such as myself.
I live outside of Boulder, and long, long after this was known, the businesses were still engaging in surface sanitization theater. My daughter's swim school had employees walking around with large devices, spraying fluid on every chair in between classes. This was going on all the way into 2022. I asked the employees if they knew that covid didn't spread on surfaces and that what they were doing was useless. They knew, but did it anyway because the owner "wanted to show customers they took covid seriously".
As a person who was demonized by my colleagues for not wearing a mask OUTSIDE on a windswept hiking trail, I'm frankly triggered by comments like this where people pretend like the information and data showing how irrational and panicked the social reaction was didn't exist. It did, and the people who were the most irrational, panicked, and aggressive towards those attempting to be rational are the ones making excuses like this.
There needs to be a reckoning on this insanity and the public health authorities who deliberately chose a "stop covid at any cost" strategy. "At any cost" is correct. They completely refused to do any form of cost/benefit analysis for the absurd panic they produced. I, like many on HN, had relatives who refused to leave their homes, and were wiping down boxes from Amazon for months. These were relatively young people with no health issues. There's a reason why the average American overestimated their likelihood of being hospitalized from covid by 50x, and that's the combination of public health and the overly compliant, ideologically blinded media in the western world.
Guess part of problem with any issue these days, half of what you say is true, the other half starts to sound like 'crazy old guy screaming at the wind'.
Yes, there was some group hysteria, no there wasn't a group intent on 'scaring' the population to 'gain control'.
Yes, requiring a mask out on a nature trail is little nutz, but also there were some going the other way 'I can cough on your grandpa if I want, this is a free country'.
Which sometimes drove them to perceive and describe a conspiracy of pro-fear institutions and actors, undermining their believability further than just the smearing of their status.
No doctor was going to come on, lie, and tell people to do less. We barely did enough as was
Public health leaders, such as Debbie Birx, believed that the ends justified the means, and knowingly obfuscated the risk stratification by age in a cynical effort to get younger people to comply with lockdowns out of self preservation.
She wrote about this in her book, and also wrote that she and her colleagues KNEW that "2 weeks to flatten the curve" was a white lie, because otherwise the public would never have agreed to lockdowns in the first place.
I stopped exercising caution earlier on in the pandemic, because in my estimation my relatively good health, age, and literature that was available (D3 being an important predictor of outcomes) meant that I was unlikely to have a poor outcome. I did eventually get COVID in Dec 2021, but aside from a total loss of smell for 12 days and a dry cough it was little more than an annoyance. I isolated, as appropriate, for a week or so (never had a fever) and went about my business. Yet, nearly two months later, I remembered telling someone that I had had COVID, they recoiled and backed away as if I were still infectious. Fear is a strong emotion.
Part of it is that the general public doesn't understand viruses. We can't see them. That's a problem, because it's an unseen enemy with (at the time) unknown outcomes—especially with rapidly changing information. I don't think the media helped either, because they relish in bad news.
My mother was very nearly hospitalized last year, though. Not from COVID but from RSV. I suspect over-sanitization reduced our baseline immunity to your typical run-of-the-mill pathogens, but I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist so that's little more than a guess. I have some friends who are nurses who suggested the theory, and they may be right.
This has to be weighted against the benefit, but in a time of free-spread and lots of people dying, closing churches was a very good policy.
My wife was hospitalized for unknown bacterial infection what the doctors assumed was caused by masks.
I contracted covid in February 2021, before my age group was eligible for vaccine. Like you I had recognized relatively early on that my level of physical fitness and nutrition likely made it low risk for me. Like you I had minimal symptoms except for a total loss of sense of smell. And also like you I encountered a completely irrational response when I would tell people months later I caught it. This included people who should have been educated enough to know better.
The really fun part was then having people pretend like the fact I had caught covid and recovered from it didn't translate into immunity. This despite the fact that only months earlier they had been asking people who had recover from covid to come in and donate plasma to help treat vulnerable patients. And also despite the fact that there had already been studies including millions of data points from Israel and Qatar that showed natural immunity to be robust.
Like most things with covid, the null hypothesis was inverted. Instead of assuming that like the vast majority of viruses, natural immunity was a thing, they inverted it to assuming that natural immunity was not a thing until proven otherwise.
Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.
No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.
I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate, and therefore are incapable of understanding science despite claiming that they "follow the science". In case anyone thinks I'm only picking on one side, I also have a half-brother who is obese and in his fifties who refused to get the vaccine when he obviously should have. He ended up catching the virus and being bedridden for over a week at his house, and then hid this from the family until his wife told us.
This is not "inverting the null hypothesis", it's the precautionary principle. The danger is unknown, there were indications that the virus was spreading rapidly and ICUs in certain pockets of the world filled up quickly early on, so it's better to be too careful than not careful enough.
Let's just look back at 1918. 17-50 million dead who'd have loved to have had the option for a more cautious handling of the situation. I'm glad we didn't have to repeat that, even though some of the measures definitely went to far, especially in hindsight.
> Living in Boulder, one of my favorite things was noticing how the same exact people who refuse to eat genetically modified vegetables for produce of any kind elevated a genetic products efficacy above the organic immunity provided by the human body fighting off the actual virus.
What does this have to do with living in Boulder?
Living in a Nordic country, one of my favourite things was noticing how the exact same people that have no problem with GMO food were talking about WHO and Bill Gates running gene experiments on the world populace with mRNA vaccines.
> No matter your position on natural immunity from covid, I think we can all agree that a person refusing to eat genetically modified produce having this opinion is irrational and inconsistent.
Just because you don't agree with their reasons or don't know them does not make their behavior irrational or inconsistent. One could argue that a single shot (or 2-3) with a well-understood mechanism vaccine against a pandemic virus is worth the risk while daily nutrients coming from GMO plants are not worth that risk for personal health and the environment impacted by it. I don't share most of that view, but I don't consider anybody holding it to be irrational. So, no, we can't all agree on that.
> I think I eventually concluded that the vast majority of the public are mathematically and statistically illiterate,
Math education levels in the world, especially in North America, leave a lot to be desired, I agree with that. But let's not call everybody illiterate who is of differing opinion. Especially as somebody who accuses others of ad hominem and may themselves need a refresher for concepts like "null hypothesis".
This is an old wives’ tale, we’re swimming in pathogens at any moment of our lives. Our immune system is always working.
Is this a true statement? If so, do you have any sources to back up your "spring 2020" claim? Heck, I didn't even think this was a true statement now, that is my understanding was that airborne transmission was the primary route, but transmission by fomites was still possible, e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
Even as early as June of 2020, the public health authority in Canada's most-populous city (fourth highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
By mid-2021, we started seeing news reports like the following:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
Stuff like that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Sadly, the widespread foolishness continued throughout Canada for most of 2022.
Even now, there are still remnants of it remaining in some cases, along with the irreparable long-term harm caused by the numerous unjustifiable policies put in place then.
So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!
A more serious take: excess deaths worldwide put us at 20+ millions deaths [1].
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> So much death and suffering and bereavement and sorrow the scale of which I have never witnessed in my entire life and I still read comments like these. Baffling!
You should be ashamed of yourself for this hyperbole, you people have ruined many young people's lives for nothing, the least you could do is apologize. And this habit of constantly looking for numbers that are always wrong and feeding into your taste for impending doom is the greatest setback to science and the rational spirit I have ever witnessed in my entire life.
See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... for example.
It's also disingenuous to say that all deaths of people who had Covid were due to Covid. Many of them who caught Covid while in hospital for serious conditions would have died regardless of Covid.
Lockdowns increased social dysfunction, and this is the root of excess deaths. Funny how you also aren't mentioning the education disaster that the hysterical, statistically illiterate cowards who closed schools caused. Schools in EU and Asia were open. Just the North American fools closed theirs.
Btw, I know many people who blame excess deaths on the mRNA vaccines. They have the same data that you do for your theory of covid infection causing excess deaths: correlation and nothing else.
Drug overdoses are way up. Crime is up. Loneliness and depression and mental illness are at all time highs.
The vast majority of covid deaths were senior citizens. The vast majority of excess deaths happening now are working age people. And cowards who became irrational won't admit this because it's too painful for them to admit their complicity.
Is that per capita or absolute numbers? Could you provide a reference?
Just saying correlation isn't causation is a cop out, just because something is correlated doesn't mean it can't be reasoned about, used as a data point.
Everything you say is true, it was hard times for a lot of people, drug use, crime, suicides, all up. What is wrong is using that to justify that we should have let more people die from the disease itself.
"Man, we would be so much better off, with less drug us, less crime, less suicides, if we had just allowed more people to die. If we only had the courage to let this spread naturally and allow more people to die, and be put out of their misery, times would be better now".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...
This is false and full-on misinformation. It's sad to to see it in a forum like HN.
> They didn't lock down.
This is misleading as well. The Swedish public works differently. There is a high trust in government and authorities. The govt said this is dangerous, stay at home if you can, so people did. The degree of distancing was on par with all other Western countries. Source: I live there.
It's not possible to do this in other countries because people wouldn't give a damn unless there is a fine.
I won't comment the rest, you are too deep into conspiracy theory territory.
Sweden indeed has the lowest excess deaths from all cause mortality, according to the OECD statistics referenced and linked to in this article, which is one of hundred published on this topic. Note that Sweden's excess deaths were not the lowest in the height of the pandemic, but fell to the lowest in 2022.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...
"Conspiracy theory territory" is an ad-hominem smear with zero substance behind it. I said nothing in my comment to claim any "conspiracy", and if you think that then you should reread what I wrote.
No we didn’t and it obviously can. What we found out is that it spreads very efficiently through aerosols, thereby making contact-based infection nearly irrelevant for public health.
Going by the comments at least.
You pay attention to the news reports showing that despite locking down the passengers of the Pacific Princess cruise ship in their cabins, the disease continued to spread from cabin to cabin?
What other theory than airborne spread fits that data?
I knew earlier than that. I considered buying a hazmat suit but realised it was a meme and settled for buying some masks etc in early 2020.
I think one could say a lot of the reaction of governments around the world was knee-jerk, "let's copy what that other government is doing" kind of thinking. Not that this is specific to the CoVid situation, there's plenty of it going on at any given moment.
I remember people talking about wiping down grocery boxes left in front of their door with hand sanitizer and leaving it to sit for 72 hours before bringing it inside.
I've got a neighbor who wears a mask to move his trash can the 20 feet from the inside of his garage to the pavement just outside. He also wears the mask when driving alone in his car.
COVID definitely broke some brains.
Sometimes I forget the hat or the mask and then I just wear one.
Otherwise, I do find that weird and I am an ardent masker. Actually, come to think of it, the other day I drove home that way because I just forgot to take it off when I left the supermarket.
So there are non-weird explanations. I doubt they account for all the cases.
It makes sense to wear a mask when you’re on an airplane or if you’re a service worker in constant contact with the general public.
Now for me personally wearing a mask was almost impossible to ignore because I wear glasses, so my glasses were constantly fogging up and it was a huge hassle and nearly unbearable over the course of a day, so in my mind it’s extra surprising to see people wearing masks when they’re alone and in my mind it doesn’t make much logical sense to do so.
They could have forgotten it when they got in the vehicle from their last destination.
There may be a kid in the back seat you couldn't see that they are trying to protect (or protect themselves from).
I personally don't understand why this is remarkable. In no way are they hurting or affecting you. Why does it matter to you if they mask?
But (knowing many people who still mask, under varying circumstances) -- that's not why they mask.
It seems a little hard to psychologically disentangle what one does for social approval vs for other reasons. For example, maybe it feels emotionally uncomfortable to not mask. Is it because the subconscious is worried about disease, or because the subconscious is worried about social approval? Probably some of both, but if we removed one perhaps the external behavior would change, hard to tell.
Also IME it seems to cluster with other appearance related traits (e.g. type of dress, mannerisms, etc).
The primary reason some people still mask is very simple: For anyone who follows basic science, not what the crowd is doing -- N95 masks in enclosed / crowded situations are still a good idea, especially for those of a certain age.
Many people continue to wear useless (or only marginally) useful masks, and in non-crowded situations (even way out in the open). Which of course ranges from silly to, at best, only marginally useful. However it seems safe to suppose that they're doing so primarily out of strictly rational concerns (however faulty their understanding of better masking practices may be). Some partially, or entirely out of fear (an understandable reaction, if they've experienced a heavy bout of Covid, or have seen its effects in others).
Also, some may remember the temporary shortage of N95s, and still think they're being good, self-sacrificing citizens by wearing less effective (or even basically useless) masks. Or they just don't like wearing N95s because they're too constricting (meaning, "too effective"). However, that is at best a secondary factory, and not the main reason why they choose to mask in the first place.
But to recap: For the vast majority of folks who mask, it's mostly out of a (perhaps flawed) sense of pragmatism -- not because they are superstitious idiots, or primarily motivated by some subconscious desire to make a social statement about "who they are".
Normal people stay home when they're sick, they don't infect others, and the basic science takes care of that just fine. If crazy people want to follow "basic science" and mask up and go out in public while they're carrying an infectious viral load, then I guess we're in Japan or something.
If "basic science" compels the general populace to mask up, even when we're uninfected, unexposed, vaccinated, and asymptomatic, then I feel sorry for basic science because it's jumped the shark.
However everyone is tired of masking now, and prefers to forget this.
Then I saw reality, where a medical professional would politely remove her mask to sneeze.
Disposable/cloth masks that do absolutely nothing to prevent the spread of an airborne disease like Covid do still work with diseases (like the Flu) with a droplet based spread.
> CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...
The problem was the cult of people claiming that a disposable/cloth mask could be effective against an airborne disease, and being exceptionally hateful to anyone who wouldn't go along with this view.
However, it can catch the comparatively large droplets you produce when someone with the Flu coughs or sneezes.
Which explains why global Flu cases (with a droplet based spread) fell to all time lows while Covid (fully airborne) continued to spread like wildfire.
From basic physics -- of course it can. They don't work particularly well, but they do partly obstruct small droplet flow. In any case, there are easily findable studies about this asserting that even that crap-ola disposable masks have at least some measurable efficacy.
How exactly does physics allow a disposable mask that completely lacks a barrier to entry on the sides filter the air?
> In hospitals, the word “airborne” is associated with a rigid set of protective methods, including the use of N95 respirators by workers and negative pressure rooms for patients. These are resource-intensive and legally required.
https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...
Medical professionals are not only required to use at least an n95 mask, they are required to keep it so tightly fitted to their face that unfiltered air cannot leak in through the sides. So tightly fitted that it digs into their skin.
> Exhausted doctors and nurses post images of their bruised faces after long shifts wearing protective gear
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-health-care-bruised...
Just because N95s are clearly better doesn't mean disposables are useless. Because, like, basic logic and stuff.
How does that prevent Covid from passing through the sides?
> Just because N95s are clearly better doesn't mean disposables are useless.
They are useless because they cannot possibly filter the virus out of the air that you breathe.
I like the way a member of President Biden's Covid advisory group put it.
If it can't prevent you from smelling cigarette smoke in the room, it cannot filter out Covid, since the smoke particles are on the same order of size.
Unfortunately we're going in circles here, and I'm going to have to bow out. You can believe whatever you want, about basic physics or anything else. It's a free planet, after all.
If I had to guess though I'd say most people mask up out of pragmatism, its kind of insane that our previous practice was to just pretend we weren't sick hard enough that we stopped being infectious.
And there are multitude of folks undergoing treatments that inhibit their immune system, where masking is especially important.
That said, people should stay away from cloth masks or surgical masks and use n95s/respirators.
Because around me in super-liberal-coastal-land practically nobody masks, and the ones I know personally who sometimes do have underlying reasons to be more cautious (e.g. relatives undergoing nasty cancer treatments and such that they don't want to spread anything to). It's been like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 people at the gym I go to, for instance, this year. Or look at the crowds in the recent NBA playoff games.
Just because there's like five videos of it happening back in 2021 on r/publicfreakouts doesn't mean it's a normal occurrence.
That was my question! Where is this happening? Cause I'm really having a hard time reconciling people's random online claims with anything I've seen while out and about daily near me...
Is there just an Extremely Online segment of the public that keeps repeating 2020's arguments without actually getting out much to see that basically everyone else has adapted as case counts have died down and people have gotten vaccinated?
("Elder millenial" or whatever the fuck demographic they're calling it now, if that's a factor.)
It's fun to earn internet points by claiming to be astonished at how dumb others are, and how much we have figured things out. Maybe after several years of this, the game is growing old.
Tolerance, understanding, consideration used to be virtues. But not internet virtues I guess.
Just in case you never tried it and the pandemic situation starts warranting mask wearing again; I don't really care whether people mask.
More importantly how did you do it? I have tinnitus and almost all painkillers are ototoxic (I.e. they can make tinnitus worse). So I’m always in a catch 22 when it comes to treating my migraines.
Have you tried ginger? Maybe triphala (amla, ginger, and turmeric powder altogether). Ginger supposedly acts as a cgrp blocker for migraines, and just generally lowering inflammation might make stuff less apt to being triggered. Tinnitus does sound like quite the curse though.
I’ve also wondered whether the active noise cancelling headphones help? Just being used to block noise and not play anything back. The real question there is whether quiet actively helps or hurts the condition. Though it feels a little like a pressure turning on when my ANCs activate and I’ve wondered how that’d interact with tinnitus.
Otherwise I’d probably default to making a painfully tedious diary of my days and log any/all tinnitus events. I’d include noises, foods, time of day, weather, anything/everything. That’d be looking for environmental or similar factors/triggers. Though it’s a hair in your ear drum or something like that and honestly tough to imagine what would help.
> Tinnitus does sound like quite the curse though.
It’s been about a decade now of constant ringing. Cicadas in my ears. For the most part I’m at peace with it. It’s like emotional quicksand, the more you fight it the worse you feel. I just don’t want it to get worse.
I don’t think silence makes it worse, but I’d does isolate the ringing so that it’s all I can hear. For that reason I prefer we’ll sealed iems to ancs.
I’ll look at that ginger cocktail you mentioned, thank you :). Coffee is a bit of a silver bullet for me. A strong coffee usually makes a huge difference. (Which used to make me think it was a caffeine addiction, but quitting caffeine didn’t stop the headaches).
From that, I'd also imagine with tinnitus similar things would help that help with migraines - like proper sleep, a sleep routine, well hydration, low stress, and avoiding triggers. Triggers for migraines can be things like types of food, smells (fake lavender does me in fast/hard and many other smells), bright lights, etc.
My other big one is cocoa. Too much chocolate anything will guaranteed give me a migraine.
Also not exercising. If I'm sedentary for too many days in a row I will get a bad headache.
I don’t think silence makes it worse, but I’d does isolate the ringing so that it’s all I can hear. For that reason I prefer we’ll sealed iems to ancs.
It’s been about a decade now of constant ringing.
I’ll look at that ginger cocktail you mentioned, thank you :). Do you take it as a medicine or as a supplement?
Franlab did a cool video on her handling of tinnitus https://youtu.be/CYKxDGukU0s
The two don't match.
But just use a proper N95 mask, it's even easier to breath than other masks
Now that masks are no longer required, I still see people doing that. So presumably they're just ignorant.
Even without microbial infections of grocery product, you do have to contend with pest insects such as roaches, weevils, and gnats infesting groceries. Quarantining them separately is a good way to carefully inspect to show that you're not bringing new pests into the home.
I remember droplets being the leading theory but do not remember a time when the medical establishment was claiming airborne transmission couldn't be real.
"Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne
Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic."
I mean, I don't believe the WHO actually stated that in those terms. This is probably a paraphrase of a more nuanced statement that erases the nuance.
https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...
>FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.
>The #coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks.
The WHO was unequivocally stating that Covid was not airborne, apparently meaning that they (wrongly) thought it was not spread through aerosols. Instead, they were saying it was spread through droplets. So they were wrong about how it spreads, but did not go as far as saying it wasn't spread through respiratory routes/air at all, which I think might be some people's interpretation of "The WHO said it was not airborne."
I can remember scientists being accused of spreading "misinformation" for proposing that airborne spread best fit the available data.
For instance, at the beginning of the pandemic, passengers of the cruise ship Diamond Princess continued to spread Covid from cabin to cabin while locked down.
There was also the case of a church choir practice where over 50 people caught Covid.
>If COVID-19 could spread so thoroughly and quickly through a choir, did that mean the coronavirus was airborne? And if the primary route for the disease’s spread was through the air, had our initial response been woefully misguided?
For researchers like Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, the answer was clear: The coronavirus is airborne, and the superspreader choir proved it.
Once agencies like the WHO established the position that COVID-19 was spread primarily through heavy droplets, it was a tall order to change it. “They’ll die defending their view,” one anonymous WHO consultant told the New York Times in July. Even now, “the burden of proof is much higher for aerosols than for any other route, and yet we have more evidence for aerosols in this case than for any other route,” Marr told me.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/coronavirus-airborne-de...
This is a much lower bar. You can always find a crank on twitter accusing something of being misinformation.
The original claim I responded to was that the medical establishment claimed airborne transmission was impossible. However, the actual take from the medical establishment was significantly less confident of that claim (emphasis added):
> Airborne spread was “not believed to be a major driver of transmission based on available evidence,” the report [from May 2020] stated.
The WHO literally made a blanket statement that Covid was NOT airborne.
> FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne.
The CDC also denied airborne spread for quite some time.
>As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were overlooking research that strongly suggested the coronavirus traveled aloft in small, airborne particles. Several scientists on Friday welcomed the agency’s scrapping of the term “close contact,” which they criticized as vague and said did not necessarily capture the nuances of aerosol transmission.
“C.D.C. has now caught up to the latest scientific evidence, and they’ve gotten rid of some old problematic terms and thinking about how transmission occurs,” said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-airbor...
The CDC's flip flopping on the issue did not inspire confidence.
>CDC reverses again, now says Covid-19 is 'sometimes' airborne
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...
If you read charitably and look at their longer, contemporaneous statements, they say things like airborne spread is possible in some limited situations but not believed to be a significant vector of spread at a population level. (Still wrong, but a lot more nuanced.)
March 2020 was the first month the disease was declared a pandemic; it was very early on. We had a broad call to recognize airborne spread by July. It's worth skimming something like https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments... .
It’s a lie. There are no excuses. It’s false.
You cannot say “Dreyfus is guilty” if you haven’t studied the subject. If an institution has credit, it’s because they have a proven track of not saying total bullshit.
The same for the president of France who said “Please go to the theaters to fight against the Covid”. He knew it was contagious, so he was giving the order to people to infect themselves, wrapped in a lie.
If they can say the opposite of truth, without having conducted proper studies and acknowledged what was obvious to everyone, then they are directly responsible for harming the public.
The WHO should be dissoluted.
I'm not sure why you would make such a misguided claim.
>Two years after the pandemic began, we finally have a good understanding of how COVID-19 is transmitted: some infected people exhale virus in small, invisible particles (aerosols). These do not fall quickly to the ground, but move in the air like cigarette smoke. Other people can get infected when breathing in those aerosols, either in close proximity, in shared room air, or less frequently, at a distance. But the journey to accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of how COVID-19 spread was far too slow and contentious. Even today, the updated guidance and policies of how to protect ourselves remain haphazardly applied
https://time.com/6162065/covid-19-airborne-transmission-conf...
- The WHO
>the medical establishment's position that airborne transmission couldn't be real because it reminded everyone too much of miasma theory
In the post they were responding to
The medical establishment believed that (some may still believe). But it is not true.
I did the chemistry math and figured 3 parts Everclear:1 part water equalled 71.25% ethyl alcohol, within the recommended of the WHO.
I even tried adding in food grade aloe to help not be as damaging on the skin (instead of water). Worked really well too.
We didn't spray down every surface, but we did grocery cart handles. Even outside of a pandemic, those are NASTY.
But yeah, we had NO issue in sanitizer. And ours you could drink too! Hahahha
I cut it with Diet Coke, and a splash of lime, and drank it to help sanitize my system of coronavirus particles.
Kept me COVID-free. I think. I don’t really remember much of the past 3 years for some reason, drinking that every day…but no nagging cough!
Unfortunately my cash savings are inflated away in the economic crisis that's now following just like everyone else's.
Who benefits from consuming this article? Was it not mass media used as a primary vector to create the hysteria in the first place? And will the wheel not again soon turn, so that the criticized can criticize the criticizers from their moral high ground created by manufactured narrative and invective?
The lesson here is: We should not read or promote these divisive articles. Three years ago, Wired were contributing to this problem: Yes, great idea, we should just buy the methanol and benzene containing products online and make hand sanitizer ourselves.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-make-hand-sanitizer/
Probably, the same lesson extends to most mass media. Consumption of mass media like this seems to tend to create knock-on effects that don't necessarily align with our best interests. We should find something better to do with our limited time.
People who believe one thing are also reading this article in resentment and despair. You don't think about them, but they are out there. When the next crisis comes, they will remember how their world view was publicly shamed, and more loudly and actively assert their views. And the people who are on top now, or think they are due to the current media cycle, will build resentment in turn. And the cycle will continue.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to publish it and sow discord. They should. I'm saying that we shouldn't elevate it. Unfortunately, even me commenting on this probably goes against that idea.
I honestly just don't see it.
> People who believe one thing are also reading this article in resentment and despair. You don't think about them, but they are out there
Again, I struggle to see that. Saying "but they are out there" doesn't mean they actually are.
Look, I just don't get what you're saying. I know when my mental health problems kick in the world starts to distort and I can feel, to a lesser degree, something like what you're saying. It doesn't mean it's universally true, or even predominantly true. And I'm not saying you're wrong either, but... you leave me baffled. Are you seeing through a glass darkly?
(For the record you're worrying about methanol contamination – for the past 3 years I've been using methylated spirits as a hand sanitiser; 90% ethanol 10% methanol. I haven't had any problems)
Awhile back, I noticed that a local liquor distillery was also selling hand sanitizer. I didn't think about it at the time, but I guess that would probably have been a pretty reliable source.
The article talks about how there's tons of left over hand sanitizer we now have to deal with. I personally just never spared a thought for there now being many millions of gallons of this stuff sitting around. I also hadn't ever thought about how they can't sell or give away or cheaply dispose of it, so it's just sitting there being all haz-matty and stuff. And, I can absolutely see some low-margin operators looking for an out in that situation.
Anyway, I'd encourage anyone who liked the article to read the complaint the county filed in this instance. It's not short but it's a pretty quick read. Start at "Pre-Fire Violations of the Hazardous Materials Laws at the Property" if you just want to read the timeline [according to the Plaintiffs] there's also lots of pictures. It does sounds like the authorities were trying to do the right thing, but the company [allegedly] ignored the repeated citations. See: https://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/lac/1118231_CountyvProlog...
That made me wonder whether there are any other facilities improperly storing this stuff. To be clear, this isn't political code; I'm not saying we need different laws, not drawing parallels to the Beirut or Tianjin warehouse explosions and saying we now suck, or drawing parallels to the Ohio rail fire and how we keep defunding and defanging government safety inspectors... Instead, this is an article talking specifically about an industrial accident and the many Americans who suffered. I had never heard about it previously, found it interesting, and learned something both from the article and by following up and looking into it a bit more myself.
Anyway, while I respect your opinion, speaking for myself I don't see this article creating any sort of division... I mean, between who? You and me and everyone who reads the article versus people who [allegedly] improperly store dangerous chemicals in residential areas despite multiple citations to stop doing that? That's the sort of polarization I don't mind.
Wish there was a way I could test for benzene and I wonder if Walmart knew it was bad and decided to dump it on customers so they wouldn’t be sitting with thousands of bottles needing disposal.
Your heirs might have a viable lawsuit.
[0]There of course have been methods invented which do not involve benzene.
(Gasoline is also not something you want on your skin.)
Something that has fragrance this long-lasting is not a sanitizer, it's an odorant or perfuming agent. Sanitizer is not supposed to be a product that makes you smell and leave fragrance residues on surfaces.
Basic alcohol sanitizer is fine. It evaporates and then that is it.
It's not quite clear why there have been so many fires, especially when we've been making and storing and shipping hand sanitizer in warehouses for a long time. Is it:
1) Something about these new companies wasn't following safety protocols, because they were new and/or rushing to market?
2) Existing safety protocols were being followed at the same rate, but the manufacturing and distribution network of hand sanitizers grew exponentially, and so fires grew along with it and this is a non-story?
3) The fires were a result of storing hand santizier intended for disposal rather than sale, so in different warehouses/locations that had different/less safety regulations or compliance?
4) The fires were set intentionally before the products were officially classified for disposal, so costs could be recouped through insurance fraud?
> On March 20, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing its regulations on hand sanitizer to “provide flexibility to help meet demand during this outbreak.” Those regulations, known as the Current Good Manufacturing Practices, had been in place since 1994 and included regularly updated rules on everything from record-keeping to product testing to packaging. The agency also paused the requirement under the Federal Food Drug & Cosmetics Act that sanitizer be sourced from pharmaceutical-grade ethanol, which is free of industrial toxins that are commonly found in fuel-grade ethanol. Businesses were still expected to test their sanitizers for benzene and other toxic compounds, but essentially on an honor system. The FDA noted that it did “not intend to take action against firms” for violations during the public health emergency.
> [...]
> By mid-June the FDA had received so many complaints that it started compiling an online list of “hand sanitizers consumers should not use.” Because the agency does not have recall authority for over-the-counter drugs, the offending companies themselves were expected to pull products marked as unsafe. Consumers had to go out of their way to find the list and stay up to date as it got longer and longer. By the end of that first pandemic summer, nearly 200 types of sanitizer appeared on the list.
> ArtNaturals was, at that point, not on the list. Its sanitizer, labeled with a tasteful, millennial-friendly design that said it was vegan and infused with jojoba oil, was marketed as “safe for kids” and “a great bulk hand sanitizer pack for parents and teachers.” At least two school districts on the West Coast had purchased the sanitizer to distribute to students, in addition to two Ivy League universities. Then, in March 2021, a year into sales, an independent lab in Connecticut called Valisure announced that it had found benzene in the company’s sanitizer. Benzene, a widely used industrial chemical derived from petroleum, can be absorbed through the skin and is known to be a risk factor for leukemia.
Then again, intentional destruction is certainly a possibility too.
The article describes the additional toxins as simply that -- poisonous toxins that you don't want to put in your hands or dump down creeks. Not any indication that they're more flammable than ethanol.
Quick story: In 2021 I was shopping at an Office Max in Florida. At the counter, the checkout guy snuck two small bottles into my bag.
Me: Wait! I didn't buy that!
Him: Don't worry, it's free.
Me: Ok, but what is it?
Him: Hand sanitizer, we're giving them away.
Me: (Takes bottles out of bag, hands back to him)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
Please don't cite the CDC for anything, they're utterly discredited.
I see no reason to think that. Sure, mistakes were made (as is expected), but utterly discredited? That's a bit over the top.
Like from now on, if they say "its not airborne" assume "it can transmit in the air" (i.e. droplets or by insects). If they say "there's no evidence of X" assume "We don't think X is false".
I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates.
> This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air
Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarters that are poorly ventilated (e.g. elevators and public bathrooms). Doesn’t even require you to be in there at the same time if it can float around for a few hours.
My (still valid) joke about the pandemic is to always be upwind of whomever you’re in contact with. 6’/2M apart didn’t matter.
I'll give you that for vulnerable populations it might have made sense in the early days of the pandemic to follow the most neurotic guidelines in an abundance of caution, but again, it took government agencies far longer than necessary to update their recommendations. And let's not forget the flip-flopping about masks which contradicted the available data even at the time. The CDC was still peddling unproven and disproved claims as of last year at least, and that's how the United States was practically the last country on Earth to maintain pointless mandates, like vaccination for international travelers, far longer than even other countries that acted more aggressively prior like Canada and Australia.
The CDC was quick to make imprudent recommendations that led to authoritarian policies, and slow to retract them when they were shown to be presumptuous, so as far as I'm concerned that's grounds enough to consider them "discredited", in the sense that I'll be skeptical of what they publish in the future instead of taking their recommendations at face value.
I traveled freely internationally throughout 2020 before a blanket ban was implemented to force people to get vaccinated. Of course, by that time, the virus was circulating everywhere, so it already made little sense, but it's even worse when you consider that long-distance travel was not a significant vector for viral spread (at that stage). If I recall correctly, the Canadian government admitted in court that their own travel ban had no scientific basis. In the US, the health authorities issued recommendations based on weak or absent data and then refused to withdraw them until the amount of data disproving those recommendations became overwhelming. That's a double standard and can hardly be justified with "uncertainty".
I'll add that many people pointed out the inconsistencies between government recommendations/policies and the available evidence at the time, and in response, they were fired, hidden or banned from social media, attacked, and demonized. Now history is being rewritten, but "in hindsight" there were plenty of warnings at all stages of this crisis.
Does hand sanitizer stop other illness?
If yes, then it is still very useful in a pandemic. If you have to go to the hospital because you're shitting your brains out from something else, then you are at insanely high right from catching covid.
Do you have any information supporting this possibility? Because hand sanitizer also might have made children stronger and taller, but I don't think it did.
>Hand sanitizers are more effective than plain soap and water alone in preventing transmission of bacteria from the hands of individuals. They play a significant role and could be an effective alternative to hand washing to achieve asepsis for all the health-care professionals in outreach program, water scarcity areas, and in routine clinical practice. Hence, stressing proper hand hygiene is an important first-line defense against the spread of multiple infectious diseases.
Maybe looking up studies on this would be a good place to start...
Of course I'm sure that there is a wide range of different answers on this that vary over a huge number of factors and illnesses in question.
And non-enveloped viruses (like Noro) aren’t easily inactivated by time and sunlight like other viruses (flu, corona).
Makes me really worry about dependence on alcohol sanitizers when it’s the difficult to deactivate viruses that easily pass the stomach and cause you bigger issues.
The “wash your hands” was a great way to blame victims for catching these diseases and push the liability to them.
Easy to say to an employee “you got the flu because you didn’t wash your hands for 5 minutes” and disqualify their paid sick day.
Much harder to blame them for… breathing at work. If we admit its airborne, then employees (and customers) have claims against the the business for work-acquired injuries.
Thats my guess anyway.
They used hand sanitizer after picking up and eating a cookie. And I was probably a weirdo for not doing so. Greasy fingers are a problem, and I guess they see hand sanitizer as a substitue for hand-washing. But hand sanitizer doesn't wash anything away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=361522...
Basically - hand sanitzer fucks up your gut-biome and kills bacteria that is important for your immune system.
STOP USING THEM.
EAT DIRT - or you will be under dirt a lot faster.
That's not a concern with hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer is alcohol-based, not antibiotic based. Alcohol denatures proteins in germs, antibiotics are more biological (IIRC).
It's akin to building up an immunity to iocane vs building up an immunity to being shot
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115
Not the same phenomena as antibiotic resistance, which is a bigger problem, but apparently this is a thing.
I don’t use sanitizer especially often, but I’ve definitely noticed a general, society-wide uptick in being cognizant of germs and cleanliness. I don’t have any figures to back it up, though I’d be curious to see them if they exist, but I definitely notice myself getting sick (cold or flu) _way_ less often, in fact, I think it’s just been once since the pandemic began. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but I think a lot of the habits we picked up during Covid will serve us positively in the future as well.
The first one or two times they said "gee, sorry, no" and explained the supply chain problems and they haven't seen a shipment in a long time. After that it became sort of a comedy where I would hardly expect them to stock it anymore for ordinary mortals. I meticulously priced out beard trimmers and hair clippers for personal use.
However, the barbers still seemed to sanitize OK. (I did have to switch to one that would trim my beard and not force me to keep a mask on during the service.) On a related note, even during the egg crisis, I've inadvertently ordered food featuring eggs at restaurants and I was not noticeably overcharged.
It all just goes to show you the disparity in the commercial vs. personal supply chains. It was explained to me that commercial food service has extremely different requirements in terms of packaging, volume, pre-preparations, shipping, processing and ingredients, and during the lockdowns, the world feebly attempted a massive shift in those supply chains, and that's partly why they had problems, because they are not interchangeable.
Companies did exactly what the government wanted them to do: make hand sanitizer as fast as possible and at massive scale. The lesson here is about leaving disaster response to governments. The FDA had a bunch of tactics it could have used. It could have continued to do inspections and changed the rules to say if you don't pass you have to display a notice of that prominently on the bottle. It could have kept the rules and just let companies scale up within the limits.
Or most obviously, it could have bothered double-checking and realized that hand sanitizer wasn't going to do anything about a virus that spreads via cloud-like aerosols. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 spread this way was widely known to independent skeptics by the time the company in the article was applying for permission to make sanitizer. What happened on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrated that the virus must be spreading through air ducts, rendering lockdowns, hand sanitizers and masks all useless. It was also expected because SARS-1 spread this way too, and because masks had never had an impact on respiratory illness before either.
All this was ignored because the medical establishment didn't know what to do if this fact was recognized. They preferred to tell people to engage in pointless and self-destructive behavior rather than say, ok, maybe there's nothing we can do except let doctors get on with it.
This aerosol denial was never formally ended and so large parts of the population is still unable to process reality even today, especially in academia and healthcare. Instead they invent ever more bizarre and desperate attempts to try and explain the abject failures of all these mitigations.
$200/night * 1000 = $200,000/day, 1.4 million bucks a week per thousand people.
Times 9 weeks... That's around $40 million minimum for 3k people.
Externalities are nasty.
Even if we exclude 2020 and 2021 as freak years because my interpersonal interactions have been drastically minimized, that still leaves one year and half.
I haven't had Covid either, and neither did my partner, and it could also be a coincidence and not related at all to our strict masking and constant ventilation policy, but again that would be an extraordinary coincidence.