On April 1, I asked “What did the hand sanitizer end up being useful for?”
On March 21, I asked “Why isn’t hand sanitizer back on store shelves?”
Despite a 1-per-customer rule, shops continue to be sold out of the stuff, right? How is that possible? As noted in my March 21 post, office buildings, non-essential stores, gyms, schools, etc. that used to buy hand sanitizer are now shut down.
Health care workers? The typical doctor and nurse who used to see patients, sanitizing every 10-15 minutes, is now mostly unemployed. Do these people need to sanitize in between filling out each new unemployment or government bailout form?
Hospitals/ICU? Most are furloughing staff. If they have fewer workers, how can they be using more sanitizer? They always used some before when going in and out of patient rooms, right? With fewer workers and fewer patients, how can they be using more?
“First responders”? Police and firefighters had hand sanitizer before. Do they need 10X of what they used to order and keep in their vehicles?
The typical consumer is imprisoned at home, right? So maybe he/she/ze/they will want to stockpile 4 bottles: one for each car, one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom. Due to the miracle of leaving the house only twice per week, however, those 4 bottles should last a year or more.
If the plants are running 24/7, where is all the extra hand sanitizer going? Why aren’t Target, Walmart, and Costco bursting with the stuff?
Related:
Some theories:
– Politically incorrect for non-medical workers to have “real” PPE and sanitizer; so why bother ramping up production if can supply to ICU? All that increased capacity will be bad for bottom line when back to normal.
– Gov’t too busy to spend printed money to worry about doing anything. Easier to require the airlines to fly at 5% capacity to keep getting NY people to CA and WA and everywhere else so the NY strain can keep spreading (instead of stopping flights to reduce the spread)?
In typical Philip style I can throw in a simple anecdote – no idea whether or not this applies more broadly: In my organization we all have our small bottles of Hand Sanitizer. When we run out we have to get the bottles refilled because they are the item that are low. The bulk sanitizer seems to be available to us.
Purell, rubbing alcohol, paper towels, & toilet paper continue to be out of stock in wealthy Calif* areas. Guess the very wealthy are paying their illegal immigrant servants to wash their Teslas with disinfectant. These guys are supposedly the insider traders, the privileged, & smartest of all of us. Usually, the day before a shortage hits the news, the item is already sold out, here.
Wish the news would cover some veterans home deaths instead of 24/7 Trump, like the 70 deaths in Holyoke, MA right near Greenspun. That would be a big blog story.
Starting May 4, Costco will require all members to wear masks in their warehouses, so you’ll be able to mask up and visit Costco to find that there’s no hand sanitizer to buy.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/29/costco-require-all-members-wear-face-masks-starting-monday/3048206001/
At least the FDA (and Massachusetts!) relaxed their rules for compounding pharmacies so they could make their own bespoke and save the poor prisoners in New York State from having to bottle it. They’ll still need to get the 94.9% pure ethanol, glycerine, hydrogen peroxide and purified water from somewhere and follow their other rules:
https://www.fda.gov/media/136118/download
If we allocated 1 gallon per month of hand sanitizer for every American/illegal alien we’d need about 4 billion gallons of very pure ethanol per year. In 2018, America produced about 16 billion gallons of “fuel ethanol” – I’m not sure if that’s good enough for hand sanitizer, but let’s assume it is, and that at *least* 25% of that ethanol could be easily redirected to hand sanitizer now that it’s not needed for fuel, because demand is so low.
It seems like we should have ample production capacity of the raw materials. We also love big-box retail stores. We have the logistical capability to ship tanker trucks full of liquids to those stores. It’s a mystery to me why, for example, places like Costco aren’t buying/making/contracting with a compounding pharmacy for 1000, 2000 or 5000 gallon tanks of the stuff, letting a couple of employees run dispensers, and telling everyone: “Come and refill your hand sanitizer bottles when you visit our warehouses wearing your masks. Five scents available. Special Costco member discount price. Limited to 1 quart per customer per visit.”
My harebrained scheme would also have the beneficial side effect of helping to stabilize the price of ethanol in the absence of fuel demand, the vast majority of which is produced in Region 2 on the graphics at this link:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36774
I don’t work for the government and therefore I’m not smart enough to figure out why someone didn’t start moving on that idea 60 days ago, when they could have predicted demand for E85 gasoline would be going through the floor.
Alex, the people in the US today would have to think and act like the engineers that ran the US space program in the 1960s.
The people in charge would have to start thinking and acting like Chris Kraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPpq1YNVKQY
Is this even possible in today’s political climate?
I knew a person who ran (head manager) a fuel ethanol plant. Their feedstock was corn and the output was > 95% pure ethanol that they legally had to add something to in order to denature. At least prior to the denaturement phase, it was top quality and I am sure it could be used for hand sanitizer.
@AlcoholBoi: Thanks, I thought so, because you wouldn’t want to have contaminants, etc. in the stuff you burn in a modern car’s engine. So it would have to be very “clean”.
@Pavel:
Unknown. Despair.
Down the street from my house is a OSHO brewery and bar. They make beer and spirits and have a great outdoor bar. They are closed due to COVID 19. But the brewery worked with WHO and Banner Health in Phoenix to make hand sanitizer for the various hospital chains in the area. They started delivering the sanitizer in 100 gallon beer kegs back in late March. They have delivered 100s more gallons since then.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/beer/2020/03/27/o-h-s-o-scottsdale-hand-sanitizer-phoenix-hospitals-coronavirus/2921739001/
http://ohsobrewery.com/
Hi. Same thing here in europe (yes, I live in france). What happened is called bureaucratic panic : state officials feared a shortage of masks and sanitizer, so they made rules … that caused an artificial shortage.
Bureaucrats tend to be shortsighted, they easily make rules for the others that create more problems than they solve.
Here, pharmacists can order masks, cook and sanitizer (the chemical composition is public), but they can’t sale the masks to the public (only to doctors and nurses), and there is shortage for components of the hand sanitizer (it’s not only alcohol and glycerin).
The Government wanted to take action, but it’s own rules for public purchasing made it a very slow process, and they did not think to change those rules for the time of the pandemic.
So, yeah, bureaucracy !
What ingredients are in hand sanitizer besides alcohol and glycerin over there? According to the WHO (about which you might reasonably be skeptical), you can make it with alcohol, glycerine and water. Also some hydrogen peroxide which is not an active ingredient for the sanitizer but kills bacteria in the solution.
https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf
Speaking of pandemic preparedness supplies, this morning I saw an online ad for “nonmedical” face masks with the question:
“Does YOUR mask pass the fire and water test? Ours does!”
If they add famine and pestilence they could call it the Four Horsemen Mask.
It’s got an “inner comfort layer” so you’ll be comfy while roasting in the inferno or gurgling in the deluge.
https://www.pulsetv.com/prodinfo.asp?number=9115
You can buy hand sanitizer at that link, too. Two 8oz bottles for just $19.99. Only $160 per gallon! Modest profit. I think my Costco Dispensary idea would dramatically undercut that price.
Sam’s was pushing it to every customer on Tuesday, so I guess their supply caught up.