No Hand Sanitizer, but Plenty of Soap During Pandemic? No Wonder Why Community Spread of CoVid 19

What was amazing to me at the beginning of the buying craze at the onset of the coming of CoVid 19 was that hand sanitizer was difficult to obtain, while bars of soap  remained plentiful. Dish soap is still not difficult to get.

Are people using handsanitizer and not washing the common silverware as much as they should be washing their hands? Have people been relying on hand sanitizer rather than soap and water? It seems so.

But then every time I would go to the bathroom at the Met Opera, the New York City Ballet or at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was always amazing to me just how many people used the bathroom and left without washing their hands, or only nominally put their hands under water for what had to be no more than two seconds, at best, top end, no more than ten.

Too frequently no soap was used. I cannot tell you how often trogdalytic maitenance would not refill the soap, and when told there was a need, they either did not acknowledge, or visibly returned a facial expression as if to say in image, how dare I get so uppity as to remind them that soap was needed in the bathroom.

But then  this is from someone who washes his hands before he relieves himself in the bathroom and after, and for more than the 20 seconds I am sure too many people in New York City think is too long.

1. If you are not washing the plastic utensils you get from take out, you are putting yourself and family at risk.
2. If you do not reheat your take out to over 180 degrees F, you are putting yourself and your family at risk.
3. If you do not know that soap and water is a lot more effective than hand sanitizer, then you are putting yourself and your family at risk.
4. If you are not using soap and water as much as disinfectant on dishes, hands, surfaces, silverware, plastic utensils, then you are putting yourself at risk.
5. Why did hand sanitizer sell out so much more rapidly than soap and water only speaks to how Americans and others actually do wash their hands.
6. The relative ease with which you can still buy soap attests to how unaccustomed to washing as frequently as is needed New Yorkers are, especially utensils that will become common again in the utensil strainer once washed . . .
7. And if you are not washing your dishes as throughly as you are supposed to wash your hands, you are putting everyone in your home at risk.
8. But then my neighbors think it is okay to throw bread and samosa out the window onto the fire escape; other neighbors scrapping their plates of tomatoes, and pickles and rice and lamb onto the fire escape; other neighbors dumping their cartons of take out as if birds eat lamb and rats won’t come instead.
9. But then in a friend’s building around the coroner, three neighbors have their children congregating in the halls playing on the floors, a child as young as 2 climbing the steps on all fours . . . the same neighbors who throw their babies’s soiled diapers in the compactor closet, on the floor, unwrapped, un-bagged. [. . . and I am not supposed to say that they are pigs because some White Protestant Bourgeois who is reaping the benefits of his brethren already having gentrified poor neighborhoods of color will call me a racist because they happen also to be Pakistani in addition to being pigs who let their babies crawl on the steps and floor of the halls in an apartment building and throw their babies’s soiled diapers on the compactor closet floor . . . and this is four families of them on the first floor . . . never mind what we have additionally documented in photographs of what others of the like do on the other floors, or in my building . . .]
10. When my friend tried to talk to one of the mothers about having their four year old throwing away a soiled diaper onto the compacator closet floor, they pretended not to understand him, when he knows he saw the one he was talking to having talked to the maiinence worker in English.
11. I do not see social distancing enough.
12. I still see too many people who do not appear cognizant enough.