Health Viewpoints
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was drowned in a flood of hand sanitizer. At my daughters’ school, every classroom had a tower dispenser right at the door, and kids were forced to apply every time they entered the room. Some kids took things even further, likely encouraged by their parents, keeping an extra bottle at their desk—applying routinely. My daughter told me one boy’s hands became so dry and chapped in the winter that they began to bleed.
Hand sanitizer was ubiquitous outside of schools, too. Banks, stores, cafes—everywhere people were, there was a dispenser nearby.Much evidence that hand sanitizer works well is based on controlled lab experiments—adding it to a dish containing bacteria or viruses and then determining what survives. Like controlled lab studies with masks, that doesn’t tell you much about how it works in the real world.
