PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: Pop Cans & Plexiglass, Public Safety Performance Part 2
Our pandemic policies were designed to keep everyone on high alert when very little was happening and the risk of being in public was low.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
We can dance, we can dance Everything's out of control
Scrub & Cover for Groceries
I know someone in Boston who avoided grocery stores from March 9th until mid-May. Covered in gloves and mask, she occasionally entered a small neighborhood convenience store after looking through the door to make sure no other customers were present. The owner had stacked cases of soda cans in front of the register to create a barrier, over which she and the cashier somehow conducted their transactions. I like to imagine she used a periscope to peer over the stack, where the thing was lurking.
She didn’t enter a grocery until she’d seen the tracing studies making it clear (although not explicitly addressed in the studies) that doorknobs and pizza boxes and milk cartons were not the things that would do us in. She had been inside reading the news while I had been visiting the grocery and my local brewery (takeout only) and gas stations (though rarely, as there were few places to drive). I’d watched the workers and was struck by how normal everything was. Aside from the lack of crowds and the arrows on the floor, things were the same as ever.
When my acquaintance finally screwed up the courage to go to a grocery, she too was struck by how normal everything seemed, how undramatic. No one appeared to be sick or dying. Although “essential,” the employees were ordinary. She realized the world was not an apocalyptic “new normal” of bunkers and blight and shielding from mysterious rays, but just a normal normal, if slower.
The messages of surfaces, scrubbing, bleach, purifiers, sanitizers, and gloves (why not goggles, earplugs, and leaches, which would have been just as effective?) were there from the beginning and became only louder as time went on. Recently, I mentioned our curious commitment to obviously wrong information to a friend, and he, like most people, said, Well, we just don’t know.
But we do know; we’ve known since April, if not earlier. He said, No, it’s been all over the place. It kept changing. What kept changing? Everything. We didn’t know. We thought it was surfaces. Then we didn’t know. We weren’t supposed to wear masks, then we were. But it’s not true. There’s a difference between the chaos and misinformation coming from the media and what we actually know, and have known all along.
When we first locked in and hoped this thing would stay outside or get the neighbor instead, I couldn’t see how grocery stores could stay open. Given everything they told us, wouldn’t grocery stores be deadly? Yet there they were, and plenty of people were going. When I took a test drive at a car dealership to get out of the house, the salesperson gave me gloves and told me not to remove them during my (solo) drive for any reason. It didn’t make any sense, as I could just as easily have coughed on my gloved hands as on my bare hands. But we pretended to believe that bare hands were dangerous.
It wasn’t plausible that we could scrub enough surfaces to survive. My Safeway is huge. Just imagine all those surfaces. If we were to spread everything out, everything we can see (never mind what lurked beneath), how much area are we looking at? If we were to peel every apple and flatten the skins, unspool every can of La Croix, open and flatten every egg carton, spread the plastic from the meat and cheese and the aluminum from the coffee, deform everything in the store—if we flattened everything, how many square yards or miles would we be looking at? Do we believe that every jar of peanuts and every melon (which must be thumped by for ripeness) has been scrubbed since the last infected zombie came through?
My Safeway has a few cashiers, sometimes a guy stacking produce, sometimes a guy behind the meat counter (the person at most risk, because of the low temperatures), and a pharmacist. That’s pretty much it. Now I saw someone else, usually a young person, perhaps enjoying a break from her now-closed high school, busying herself at the front of the store with a spray bottle. Always at the front of the store, squirting and dabbing and rubbing. The front doors were propped open, so at least we didn’t have to touch door handles (though she cleaned them anyway). She busied herself near the entry, scrubbing the sign above the watermelons, the plastic grocery baskets, the metal racks holding cases of strawberries.
At my Whole Foods, the scrubber worked in the decompression chamber at the store’s entry, which housed plants and shopping carts and cases of water. He scrubbed away at glass and signs and handles and carts. It was all very visible, visibly safe. Not once in these stores did I see anyone cleaning anything beyond fifteen feet from the entry.
Yet there we were. The cashiers were friendly and efficient, scanning, ringing, bagging, handling every item twice. I put my credit card into the machine, entered my shopper number (I’ll admit I skipped this step for a few weeks before resuming), signed the screen with the stylus, and took my receipt. We all touched everything, and we all survived.
If our virus transmitted from surfaces, these stores would need teams of trained professionals in hazmat suits systematically working every aisle of an empty store before allowing the next customer in. It was all theater. Although there was no body count, the show continued through April, May, now June. Apparently, it will go on forever.
In early June, I went to a Starbucks, where the barista put cream in my coffee because condiments were dangerous. Refills were forbidden; my cup was contaminated and had to go into the trash. (Yet restaurants still used glasses and mugs.) The customer-facing water station was blocked by crisscrossing tape, and the plastic cups were gone. It felt as if the place had been looted, which was perhaps fitting, as Starbucks boarded the windows a few days later to protect against actual looters.
Safety Dancing in Restaurants
I went to a favorite breakfast restaurant, where I would have liked to sit outdoors, but the patio was “full” because the restaurant was required to maintain the same distance rules outdoors as indoors, reducing the patio capacity to perhaps a third of what it could have been. It was just one of hundreds of misguided safety measures that made us less safe.
So I ate indoors. (I wasn’t afraid of the indoors; I just preferred the lake view from the patio.) I had to wait while someone visibly, energetically, broadly scrubbed my table and seats. The table was empty—no sugar, salt, pepper, ketchup, hot sauce, napkins, silverware, menu. I had to scan a bar code for the menu, though the menu could just as easily have been attached to the wall instead of the laminated sheet containing the barcode. Using the menu on the phone wasn’t impossible, but it was inconvenient and unnecessary. The more I did it, the more frustrating it became, as often I had poor cell service, requiring me to track down a server to request a wifi password, one of many pandemic nuisances that required more human interaction when the TV experts preached fewer.
Employees were extremely nice and friendly, as every worker has been everywhere since it all began, in contrast to those practicing public panic and shaming, which always seemed to come from people off-duty, not on the job. Early on, I attended conference calls from local government and business leaders discussing the paycheck protection program, and I learned that PPP funds could be used to pay severance to get rid of unwanted employees, which might explain why the workers have been so friendly and helpful and undramatic.
I had eggs, a side of bacon, tomato juice, water, ketchup (in a private safety dish), and salt and pepper (an unceremonious pile of paper packets), all requiring multiple visits from the server and all creating multiple touched surfaces. I watched a young woman spray and scrub the glass at the front door, a surface no customer would touch. The host station just inside the entry was vacant, as the restaurant had erected a temporary station twelve feet or so into the building, presumably to prevent diners from clustering at the door, which pushed interactions from the stiff breeze of the entry into the still air of the interior. We practiced fake safety everywhere. Of course, no one cared, and no one was in actual danger, but virtually every showoff safety protocol made things just a little riskier than if we’d emerged from a time-warp blissfully unaware of our new virus.
The makeshift nature of this lonely kiosk, along with the decommissioned tables marked by masking tape and the chairs stacked in a corner, made this formerly appealing and busy place feel like an East German bus station from the 1970s. The kiosk featured a vertical plexiglass pane, about two feet wide, as if it were kevlar, as performative and useless as the professional scrubber who spent her time wiping it down.
Visit here for a companion piece on re-opening safety theater.
The politicization of the Covid-19 virus reflected the worst of our nature as humans. We're much better than that.