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Hand sanitizer is really useful in office's and when you're out and about at the moment though.

You basically can't get out of an office bathroom without realistically touching several surfaces of questionable cleanliness for a contagious pathogen, for example.




You take a new paper towel and use it to open the door.


Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses.


Most sources [1] say that alcohol-based hand sanitizer can deactivate targetable viruses within 30s. The CDC recommendations for coronavirus are to apply a suitable amount and take at least 20s to spread it over your hands completely.

Coronavirus's are a class of viruses well known to be susceptible to deactivation by alcohol exposure [2].

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567011...

2. https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfac...


"Takes 4 minutes of hand sanitizer to remove viruses."

No it doesn't. The study you refer to was one specific virus (influenza-A) that simulated essentially coughing directly onto your hands. Where the virus was encased in large volume of mucus.

That isn't how people use sanitizer. It's for dry contact displacement, and there it is incredibly effective. You should still wash your hands when you can, of course, but these misleading claims aren't helping anything.




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