Empty Shelves, Worries In Aisle 15

Siiri Luukkonen sheepishly grabbed a few bottles of hand sanitizer from a nearly empty shelf at the CVS Pharmacy downtown.

She was one of the lucky ones, as fretful shoppers cleared store shelves citywide of products that may — or, according to experts, may not — help them avoid coming down with the virus now called COVID-19, aka coronavirus.

Luukkonen moved here recently from Finland. She has been reading about Finns coming down with the virus.

“I’m reading all this news about the coronavirus. I’m a new mom, so I’m scared,” Luukkonen said as she scoured Aisle 15, baby stroller in hand. ​“My husband always tries to calm me down.”

Another customer, Harry Cohen, passed by the shelf of hand soaps and few remaining hand sanitizers. He was not panicking yet, he said.

“Now that I see there’s so few, maybe I better grab just one. But no face masks,” Cohen said.

“Stuff has just been vanishing,” reported Krystal Gomez, store manager of an east side Dollar Tree.

What Does & Doesn’t Help

Fears about the spread of coronavirus have begun to plague New Haven drug stores, as they have nationwide. Throughout the city, stores have sold out of hand sanitizers and face masks. The CVS downtown had barely restocked with its latest shipment on Tuesday morning before the high-demand products were gone.

Will these products actually keep New Haven safe?

The Independent posed that question to Yale School of Public Health Professor and department chair Albert Ko.

Ko is something of an international expert on infectious diseases. He was on the front lines of the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil and is part of the World Health Organization initiative intended to speed up the development of treatments in emergencies like the spread of COVID-19.

Ko said that New Haven shoppers are correct that hand sanitizer is helpful. But they should steer away from face masks unless they are sick.

“The evidence tells us that these kind of surgical face masks that you can buy at CVS or Walgreens don’t work very well to prevent infection. They’re not air-sealed,” he said.

If someone has already gotten sick, face masks do prevent them from sneezing or coughing on other people and getting them sick. So shoppers should leave the face masks to those already ill.

Ko said that hand sanitizers do help prevent disease, as long as they contain more than 60 percent alcohol. However, hand-washing with any commercial soap is even better. (The Center for Disease Control recommends washing hands for at least 20 seconds.)

“People should be frequently sanitizing or disinfecting their hands if they are frequently coming into contact with people or surfaces touched by many people. The best way to disinfect your hands is actually using soap and water,” he said.

Ko’s top tips:

1. 1. Wash your hands often. Use sanitizer with over 60 percent alcohol content if you are away from the bathroom.

1. 2. Sanitize frequently touched surfaces like phones and handles on sinks and doors with household disinfectants like Windex or Clorox.

1. 3. Avoid people who you know are sick.

1. 4. If you get sick, stay home.

1. 5. When you cough, cover your mouth with a tissue. Then drop that tissue into a trash can and wash your hands.

Ko said that these are the main steps New Haveners can take now. If there emerge confirmed cases of coronavirus in New Haven, then residents can start thinking about changing their routines in what he calls ​“social distancing.” This would range from avoiding crowded areas to the extreme case of school closures.

The city has a coronavirus emergency response plan in place that involves the fire department, an ambulance and cop cars, in case someone comes down with the disease. Hospitals are also coordinating across Connecticut, and the Yale New Haven Hospital confirmed that they are fully stocked with the supplies they need.

Stores Helpless in Shortage

In the Quinnipiac Meadows neighborhood, pharmacies are grappling with the high demand for hand sanitizer and face masks. While shipments of the cleaning products are still coming in weekly to the Dollar Tree on Foxon Boulevard, store manager Gomez said the products run out in the blink of an eye.

Gomez said she usually doesn’t set aside sanitizer bottles for employee use as soon as a shipment arrives, but this week she did. Gomez put aside four hand sanitizer bottles to keep at three of the store registers and one in the employee office.

While placing six bottles of hand soap and three containers of disinfectant wipes on the checkout counter, a Dollar Tree customer, Stella Drake, asked the cashier if they had any more travel-size hand sanitizers.

When the cashier informed Drake that the store is out for the week, Drake replied, ​“I can’t find any bottles anywhere. I even checked West Haven. My kids can’t leave their classes every second to wash their hands, so I need to find them [sanitizers].”

Meanwhile, hand sanitizers and face masks have been out of stock at Walgreens for nearly two weeks, thanks to a shortage at the warehouse level.

Last week Walgreens assistant store manager, Bryan Rosa, started to notice less in the weekly shipments to the Foxon Street store. The most recent shipment of sanitizer was last week’s and it had three to five bottles of hand sanitizer.

Rosa said there were no bottles in yesterday’s delivery.

The Foxon Street store also ran out of face masks about three weeks ago.

“Some customers are really desperate for these items and we have to keep telling them we’re out,” Rosa said.

Rosa said he hasn’t received any updates of when a shipment of sanitizers and face mask will come in. From recent shelf inventories, Rosa said he would not be surprised if demand causes a temporary shortage in disinfectant wipes also.

“It’s almost like we’re trapped, because even though we want to, we can’t help right now,” Rosa said.

Order quantities are all system-generated, he said, so he is unable to react to predictions of shortages.

Rosa said he found six opened or empty hand sanitizer bottles around the store these past weeks. He assumed customers took the sanitizer without paying out of desperation.

Before joining the Foxon Street Walgreens workforce, Rosa worked for eight years at a Walgreens in Puerto Rico. Rosa said a nearby area was hit with a hurricane during his time there.

Rosa recalled the chaos leading up to the hurricane and after. ​“People were panicked,” he said.

While circumstances in New Haven are different, Rosa said the experience taught him how to deal with panicking people.

His own team has started to prepare for the worst. The store’s employee hand sanitizer stock is low, with one bottle of hand sanitizer left at each of the four departments.

Only ten masks are left for staff. The team has opted not to clean the store’s bathrooms and other areas with the mask as they normally would, to be sure there are masks for employees in case the virus spread worsens.

Rosa has shared an email from a store corporation representative with all of his fellow employees. The email has information about the coronavirus, proactive care, and how to spot symptoms.

The Walgreens Pharmacy staff on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden is hopeful for new shipments of disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, and face masks this weekend.

Though the manager said he ordered extra supplies when the demand first began increasing he said he never received the products due to the supplier running out of stock.

The Dixwell Avenue Walgreens has had practice runs in the past handling shortages of products like water and milk during a natural disaster.

Calm on Chapel

On Chapel Street, Dollar Store lead sales associate Ellis Goodlow showed the Independent to one lonely keychain hand sanitizer on the Chapel Street shelves. He said that the Dollar Store does not stock face masks.

“Everybody has been asking for hand sanitizer,” he said.

Otherwise, the week was much the same as other weeks. Drinks, foods and tissues sell out first, he said.

Compared to the bustle in the aisles of pharmacies, the Dollar Store was somewhat calm. One woman hurried in to buy Lysol to protect herself from the common cold. One shopper’s wife wanted Purell, so he was trying to track one down after visiting CVS.

Shoppers Tesha Tillman and Tyreis Gibson were restocking their house with their usual soaps and cleaning supplies. They said they were at low risk of contracting the coronavirus because they spend much of their time at home.

In any case, Gibson said, he could not afford to stockpile food or other supplies.

Waleska Martinez was looking for new pillows and silverware in the Dollar Store with her sister, Milda Ramirez. She offered advice gleaned from Univision that was nearly verbatim to Ko’s tips.

“It’s like the flu. You have to wash your hands. Just take care of yourself,” Martinez said.