Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

We are not short on disposable gloves.
We are sanitizing our masks with a strong UV-C light every night.
No, the light is not visible to us at any time because it's on a timer and it's used in a storage room we seldom go into and if needed, we can wait the timer out and the light is off when we do go in.

We need the alcohol for my wife's personal care, which is her catheters and her irrigation gear.

We don't need a lot but we do need "enough" to get the job done every day.

Alcohol is a necessary component for us as well. My wife has a tracheostomy, which requires twice daily treatments lasting a half hour plus (weather plays an amazingly potent role in the process) and weekly trache tube changes, all of which have to be done in a sterile environment. Local pharmacies do not reserve supplies for those at high need, so (like the States competing for PPE supplies against all comers) getting them tends to be luck of the draw. It's infuriating.

It IS infuriating.
Prior to the pandemic, anything medical that we needed, the VA could send it to us almost immediately, no questions asked.
They can't even send us any alcohol.

That's pretty awful.
I went ahead and placed ONE order for a thirty dollar liter bottle of 200 proof but I intend to get the still up and running ASAP.

This is a direct violation of the most basic and essential needs for survival and it points directly to "providing for the Defence and general Welfare" especially as it pertains to disabled veterans, and certainly to all persons living inside our borders as well.

The Federal Government has a duty to respond to the best of its ability to these shortages. They should not exist in the wealthiest country on Earth for any reason whatsoever.

Trump is acting like The Hunt Brothers when they attempted to corner the market on precious metals, only Trump is succeeding.

Can't you appeal to her doctor and/or the local health department to see if an exception is granted and they provide her with more cleaning and disinfection supplies?

I wonder if paint or home improvement stores have any alcohol? I don't think the denaturing agents are harmful to bare skin. Any combination of methanol, ethanol, or isopropanol is going to work. It's a pain in the ass, but you can distill your own moonshine if you have something that can be fermented, some yeast, and some sugar.

One thing I have found, is I don't bother with gloves much. I just touch packages or the mail and such, and then either hand sanitize or wash my hands with hot water and dish detergent. You are not going to get the virus by touching it, just from then touching your face or other things in you house or car before you sanitize them. And you can accidentally do that with gloves on. I worked in an OR for a while when I was young, so I have a very good knowledge of sterile procedure. I know when one or both hands are contaminated, and act accordingly.

It's funny, but my wife is a retired vet and pathologist who worked with stuff like possibly rabid dog carcasses. She is a lot more casual about this stuff. The other day she took some keys from another person we should have kept at a distance, who was not wearing a mask. Then she stuck her hand in her purse!

They don't have enough to spare right now.
DHS and FEMA (Trump version) are playing Keep Away with their supplies as well.

The only thing I need to do yet, is to construct the lid with the standpipe coming out of it and the copper coils for the condensation.
I already have all the other hardware and ingeredients for the fermentation.
In fact, once I coil my copper pipes, I'll put a pull-pull computer fan on each end to speed the cooling process.
Pull-pull because that way the air has to come in through the coils instead of being pulled and pushed through them instead.

Yes, gloves can actually backfire because they aren't as easily sanitized as bare hands, and the person can then acquire a false sense of security. Also, gloves are known to deteriorate after 2 hours with micro-holes.

This is how I use gloves: if I go to a grocery store I wear one glove in one hand so that I can touch the self-service pads that hundreds of people touch, to pay for my purchase. I then discard it before I get back to the car, and get my 2oz hand sanitizer and disinfect both hands, the one that didn't have a glove and the one that did. Same with gas pumps. I'll have one glove to handle the pump and punch in the credit card numbers, then I discard it too before going back into the car.

So basically I only use gloves to touch the most heavily trafficked surfaces and just for that specific and short purpose then I discard them.

I just disinfect the car surfaces regularly, steering wheel, dash, door handles, buttons, etc and then I disinfect the house doorknobs.
Coming into the house the gloves get taken off immediately and disposed, then the doorknobs get sanitized.

Works too, as long as you remember not to touch your mouth or nose or eyes with your gloved hands.