Day 195: Don't Drink the Hand Sanitizer

New Zealand is up to 17 cases (that's 3.4 cases per million residents), and people are already hoarding and protesting the lockdowns there. Elsewhere, the Ukraine has passed the China point. Next up appears to be the Dominican Republic.

Despite its being a relatively harmless alcohol that has only ever killed one person (a far cry from ethanol's body count), the FDA has freaked out about trace amounts of 1-propanol in some hand sanitizers from Mexico. They've been added to their list of unsafe hand sanitizers, which is 149 products long today. The FDA goes on at some length about how 1-propanol "can be toxic and life-threatening when ingested" instead of ethanol, particularly in children. (Presumably adults can hold this slightly-souped-up liquor.)

Until now, PlagueBlog was unaware that hand sanitizer was supposed to be potable, never mind fed to children as martinis. This hype can only reduce our estimate of the dangers of rubbing methanol on your hands; on re-examination of the FDA's five previous announcements about methanol in hand sanitizer, it turns out their main concern has always been children (and pets) drinking the hand sanitizer. Nevertheless, PlagueBlog recommends steering away from hand sanitizers that are composed entirely of methanol. As for the 1-propanol versions, we recommend drinking your hand sanitizer in moderation: no more than half as many Purell martinis as you would normally consume.

PlagueBlog is publishing this public service announcement immediately. Maps and/or complaints about the cities and towns data being as borked as yesterday's dashboard was will follow later today.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today.

P.P.S. Unlike the daily dashboard, which has lost its county counts, the cities and towns report has only gained in intriguing new columns, some of them with color-coding. Sadly the county data that got included into the cities and towns report at some point (along with every other stray bit of data the MDPH felt like reporting on weekly) only covers the franken-county of "Dukes and Nantucket", so integrating it with the real counties of the census data would be a bit of a kludge.

Speaking of kludges, a third of every relevant page of the cities and towns PDF is devoted to the same footnote about the data. Fortunately, the MDPH provides an Excel file of the data these days so the punch card girls computers are grinding away at that instead. Results are expected sometime tomorrow.