Mike the Mad Biologist tweets he just checked five drugstores and not a single one had any alcohol hand sanitizer left.

Would vodka work?

Cara tweets that last night on the Green Line, she saw:

a guy wearing a big mask. He kept applying Purell every time he touched something.

Mike Mennonno took his first subway ride in awhile yesterday - armed with a copy of an E.B. White essay he wanted to read about a dying pig with an infectious disease (Mike is cheery like that). He reports an amazing thing:

... [N]o one -- and I am not exaggerating here -- no one in my car coughed or sneezed the entire trip. Seriously, I don't think I've ever experienced anything like it before. Usually people do a good deal of coughing and sneezing on public transit. I've always suspected that most of it is psychogenic -- no physical cause. Rather, people do it to further insulate themselves when in close contact with strangers. They're essentially saying: "Stay away! I'll cough on you! Keep your distance! I'll sneeze on you!" Not that they're exactly conscious of their motives. ...

It's hard to ague when people are wearing masks, the T is cleaning trains in the middle of the day, Harvard Medical students are told to stay home and a plane is forced to land at Logan because a passenger felt achy.

Samantha is driving and talking to her mother on the phone about swine flu when:

Mom: "So you need to make sure you grab a mask from the hospital so you'll have one blah blah bl-"
Me: "OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD"
Mom: "SAMANTHA what's the matter?!"
Me: "There is a SPIDER and it is crawling right in front of me and it is moving down toward my legs on my god oh my god"
Mom: "It's okay just pull the car over...."
Me: "I AM! It's just that I am going 85 miles an hour on a 4 lane highway talking on a cell phone haven't slept for 24 hours and a SPIDER IS TRYING TO KILL ME!"
Mom: "I KNOW! Be careful."

Grads won't get traditional handshakes tomorrow. Or as James T. Kirk might say: SWIIIIINE!

Kerry brings us the amazing news (at least to those of us committed to the hermit's lifestyle) that you can now get Goldenstash bandanas and that they make excellent facial coverups in these days of Swine Flu Code Red OMFG We're All Going to Die:

What would Goldenstash do? Probably, buy a couple bottles of Cold Duck, invite some ladies over and wait for the apocolypse. I hope you do the same.

I wonder what I could get from my respirator, the one I still have one down in the basement from my Operation Replace Half a Wall in the Bathroom?

Jenny Frazier, meanwhile, tweets she is feeling bad for the intern at work today:

Her project? Tracking down local suppliers of surgical face masks for a group. They want 15,000 of em.

Davis Square statue this morning. Photo by Ringsided.

None of your employees were really worried about swine flu until you all decided this week to send out memos about it. Now they're worried. Please stop taking communications lessons from the Herald, which apparently hasn't gotten the news that while four Massachusetts children died this past winter from boring regular flu, nobody's actually died here from KILLER FLU.

Mike the Mad Biologist compares the hysteria over swine flu with our ho-hum reaction to boring old regular flu, which kills 36,000 people a year:

... That's double HIV/AIDS deaths. But nobody gets paranoid about handwashing (WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS!!). There's no serious awareness of 'coughing' hygiene. It's just shrugged off, even though a successful vaccination strategy would save tens of thousands of lives. Clearly, nobody cares about these deaths: if the public as a whole did care, vaccination would be a sacrament.

But suddenly TEH SWINEY FLOO emerges and suddenly everybody becomes a public health maven. I don't mean to downplay the potential seriousness of this particular influenza, but, so far, it's in roughly the same mortality ballpark as most other influenzas. There needs to be vigilance, but, if this influenza burns out (or even if it doesn't), we'll still have to deal with the seasonal influenza pandemic (which is what it should be called). ...