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To be honest I’d be pretty happy if we created a strong norm against attending events while sick even disregarding COVID-19. Our culture(s) seem to not take this very seriously and this seems really dumb to me.
I’ve been to multiple biosecurity events where at least one attendee came while ill. It’s impressive dedication but probably not net-positive in expectation.
My guess is that putting hand sanitizer conspicuously out near food will be more important than teaching and modeling handwashing.
In general, reading that the WHO prefers sanitizer to handwashing (when your hands aren’t visibly dirty) was a really big update for me, because hand sanitizer is so much easier to use.
I think learning to use hand sanitizer correctly isn’t meaningfully different from learning to wash your hands well...and most people fail at both!
Yeah, most people (including me) don’t apply multiple mL of hand sanitizer over every surface of their hands, then rub the hands together until it dries completely (which takes around 20 seconds).
I’d really like to see effectiveness differences between the gold standard and “regular person use”.
If children washing their hand in Spanish daycares looks like “regular person use”, then this study found hand sanitizer to be more effective.
(Though I can’t tell how much more carefully supervised the children using hand sanitizer were; there’s a paragraph that sort of suggests this-”The HSG children were supervised by DCC staff and parents when using the hand sanitizer, and in the case of young children, it was administered by DCC staff and parents. The CG followed usual hand-washing procedures.”- and that might explain the whole difference, since it’s not that dramatic.)
Happy to be corrected here, but I think hand sanitizer is recommended by the WHO for healthcare workers because of its strong antibacterial properties, and if you’re concerned specifically about viruses you will usually be better off with hand washing.
Very interested in the right answer here. Wikipedia says “90% alcohol rubs are more effective against viruses than most other forms of hand washing.” (And I’m hoping it will generalize to the 70% concentration I typically use.) But here’s a 2019 article that seems to show weak effectiveness against flu.
I wish I could look up the source for that 90% quote, but it’s from a book from the 1990s. Quoting a press release from ASM about that same 2019 result:
More alcohol isn’t necessarily better- this 2002 CDC Review on Handwashing notes that:
The tests summarized in that report suggest high efficacy at the 70% concentration for a lot of viruses, included some non-enveloped ones:
[edited to clarify] So maybe the reason that the CDC recommends handwashing is that healthcare workers are likely to have soiled [ETA:
or dampor mucus-covered] hands?I might be misunderstanding your meanings here, so please disregard if so, but:
TWiV discussed this paper a few weeks ago. I think it’s important that the finding is that virus specifically in wet mucus, not just in water generally. Mucus has complicated properties that I think are important here.
The WHO recommendation for hand sanitiser is specifically for when hands are not visibly soiled, so I don’t think it’s this.
Yeah, edited to clarify a bit. At this point I’m just a bit confused about the CDC recommendation to favour handwashing:
Yeah, I’m also unsure about that. I tried to find some NHS guidelines as a third opinion but didn’t find any public-facing guidance directly comparing the two. The Mayo Clinic seems to weakly/obliquely recommend washing over sanitiser, but doesn’t say why and might just be copying the CDC.
I initially tried washing my hands all the time, and found that I quite quickly developed chapped and painful hands; this quickly went away after I switched to using hand sanitiser in borderline cases. So anyone who wants to follow the CDC over the WHO should make sure they have gentle soap!
Sadly I’ve seen lots of (most?) people at multiple events (including at Catalyst) completely ignore available hand sanitiser, so I don’t think this works that well by itself. It might work if the organisers intentionally create common knowledge that guests should use hand sanitiser before touching food, and that not using it is considered defecting.
Is the elbow bump recommended even if people are sneezing/coughing into their elbows?
[EDIT: maybe people should only cough into their left elbow?]
I’m coming into the conclusion that either finger guns, bows, or some other non-contact solution is better, or if we should give up on discouraging handshakes and instead encourage hand sanitizer immediately after washing hands.
I’m excited to see local groups experiment with trialing different practices and seeing which ones stick.
Handshakes are plausibly one of the more likely ways that infectious diseases spread, so it’s worthwhile to look for healthier alternatives.
Tabarrok likes fist bumps: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/02/all-praise-the-fist-bump.html
Do you have a sense of what % of badness in handshakes are in fist bumps?
Wow. A lot can change in just eighteen days.
Tell me about it!
Update: Other Bay Area EA organizers and I have decided to cancel/postpone all medium (>15 people) and large-scale public events until further notice. I will publish more details later.