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.)
Hand sanitizer drys out skin by removing the protective lipid barrier.
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.
(USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms).
Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
In a small sampling of places I've been in the MD metro DC area it's not uncommon they have a dispenser at the door, prominently placed to indicate suggested use. A few places have personnel dispensing it, some in a manner that does not suggest it being optional.
In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)
