PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: Re-opening Rituals: as Fatalities Decline, Calls for Safety Increase
The press and their followers settle on the forever playbook for keeping the public in thrall.
In 1930s Germany, the state required citizens to perform the Heil Hitler greeting and salute. In a book from the time called School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis,” German emigre writer Erika Mann described the practice:
The formula is required by law; if you meet a friend on the way to school, you say it; study periods are opened and closed with “Heil Hitler!”; “Heil Hitler!” says the postman, the street-car conductor, the girl who sells you notebooks at the stationery store; and if your parents’ first words when you come home for lunch are not “Heil Hitler!” they have been guilty of a punishable offense and can be denounced.
Office workers found it so exhausting to Heil everyone each time they left their desks that they avoided trips to the bathroom, preferring to hold it until the end of the day. I found myself similarly wearied by the constant donning and doffing of the mask, which was purely for show. At a Mexican restaurant, the host asked if I wanted to sit on the second-floor outdoor patio. Sure, I said, and she offered me a mask. A dilemma. I had my own, but it was in my backpack and it seemed pointless to dig it out to climb a flight of stairs only to take it off again, so I asked if I could just sit at a ground-level sidewalk table instead. I wasn’t protesting; I just took the simpler path. Blind obedience to superstitious ritual is tiring and bad for the spirit.
On a sunny June afternoon, we visited a recently opened cocktail bar. After we passed the temperature test, the hostess presented a squirt bottle of something smelly. I asked if it was required, and she said a bit sheepishly, No, but we really want people to do it. It wasn’t her fault that every business and government official feared accusations of insufficient safety, so I let her squirt my hand.
There were no napkins at the table, of course, and no menus or salt shakers or silverware or anything else. Our restaurants were like operating rooms. We sat on recently (hastily, ostentatiously) wiped benches and rested our elbows on damp tables. The hands would have to remain gunky. A trip to the bathroom seemed more trouble than it was worth. I would have to mask up for the walk, and my mask would then stink of the gunk from my hands. So I remained in place and sipped my Champagne smelling only the 30 cents’ worth of chemicals in the “sanitizer.”
As illness and fatalities continued to fall in June of 2020, the media and the government kept the clamps on and the performance going. The required visible acts of obeisance had nothing to do with public health or safety. We wore the masks to enter places but could remove them when we sat down, when the opposite would have made more sense. The first eight ambulatory seconds, from fresh air through still-pretty-fresh-air, are not dangerous, although the next ninety minutes under a low ceiling in a corner with unknown air circulation could be. In 2020 it was important to be visibly safe rather than actually safe. The masks were a status symbol. We wore them as people wore “I voted” stickers on election day. Anyone failing to perform the ritual faced indignation or rage from fellow diners.
In a wine bar that specializes in playing old vinyl records, I could see respiratory droplets in the air when I spoke, as we had to shout over the music. An app on my phone showed that the music was over 80 decibels. Sustained exposure to noise above 90 decibels can cause hearing loss. We had worn masks to walk into the restaurant, without conversation, only to remove them to begin shouting. This is the science of our novel pandemic.
It would be smarter to ban music than to ban menus and condiments and to require masks to walk through doorways. Most known superspreader events have been loud gatherings with singing or shouting or other agitated vocalizing. Because I know that, I can avoid loud places if I feel there is risk. And I can be careful when it’s 36 degrees outside. But because Donald G. McNeil at the New York Times, the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, the late-night comics, scared governors, and “experts” focus only on the 6-foot forcefield, masks, and hand sanitizer, we have no idea how to be safe.
Our rules for elevators similarly depend on convenience and theater, not safety. An elevator that travels just a few floors restricts occupancy to one person or “one party,” while an elevator that travels 30 floors allows strangers to stand in the corners on wingtip decals even though a long ride is riskier than a short ride (if not much). An elevator in a 30-floor building could result in 30 stops with 50 strangers over 15 minutes, but we accept that because what are we going to do, take the stairs?
Fearing Outsiders
Although we knew by April that surfaces didn’t spread the virus and breathing outdoor air without a mask didn’t do it, the re-opening rules were all about surfaces and masks, indoors or out. To rent a vacation condo to a short-term guest in Oregon required signing a kind of loyalty oath. I had to provide gloves and masks to renters, post CDC guidelines in the unit, provide additional linens or anything else of “porous” material, perform rituals of scrubbing and de-sanitizing, and many other pointless acts.
One of the many absurd requirements in all three counties where I own short-term rentals (in two states), is a 24-hour coronavirus buffer between visitors, as if this thing, which does not transmit from surfaces and does not remain potent in the air indefinitely, will somehow be kinder if we give it time. These counties strongly recommend 48 hours, as if doubling a meaningless gesture is safer than the original meaningless gesture. There are no requirements governing the cleaning itself: cleaning crews may enter any time, including a few minutes after a guest leaves or a few minutes before a new guest arrives. Housekeepers have to get things done, so they are unrestricted.
We know they will be fine: as with grocery workers and gas-station workers and truck drivers and warehouse workers (unless the warehouse is refrigerated), the risk is vanishingly small. But we tacitly acknowledge the low risk to these workers while pretending vacationers are in grave danger. Or maybe our rule-makers believe that low-wage cleaning crews get what they deserve, while well-to-do tourists must be protected.
The rural Oregon authorities “strongly advise” that renters bring their own food and supplies rather than shop locally, another arbitrary rule that lets us pretend we are doing our part. Xenophobia is official policy. We are disease-free, but people from out there are filthy and dangerous. (The officials didn’t seem to care about the livelihood of the grocery workers or shop owners.) Although I rented a car because it was cheaper than driving my own, I made sure it had local license plates.
Anyone who looked around by early April or read the tracing studies knew that there was almost no risk from outdoors, surfaces, or limited indoor exposure (especially in large spaces such as grocery stores), yet the catastrophising headlines and prohibitions only increased as summer approached. Beaches remained closed in most states. Parks were closed, forcing hundreds of mountain bikers to park along busy highways rather than in nearby (now-gated) parking lots. Gyms were closed indefinitely. (Mine, run by the local municipal government, has said nothing about a refund.) Millions of us knew that there would be no significant spike in fatalities when Georgia opened its nail salons or when Texas allowed people to buy a beer, but the dominant view required that we pretend otherwise. The story had turned into doctrine so long ago that if the press offered any sense of relief from the most dire warnings, they would risk losing the whole house of cards.
A Predictable Wrinkle: Adding Violence to Pestilence
When the riots erupted in late May, we were not surprised to see the press fall silent at the sight of huge crowds shouting for hours at a time, even though “officials warn” had been the default headline throughout May. The press had increasingly racialized the news in recent years, and by April they knew they could attach any ideology to the new pandemic and many people would accept it. The demographic of the crowds in the streets looked a lot like the demographic of the safety shamers. Distancing was out (though masks provided anonymity for many people committing violence). Bricks and bats were in. The pandemic was on pause, and the press and our leaders never had to acknowledge how far off they had been.
When asked about the risks from protests and riots, the health director of Los Angeles County, Barbara Ferrer, who had been warning that it was too risky to open churches or stores or beaches, said that we wouldn’t know “for weeks” how many people would be sick from the protests and riots. As a health official, she knew that the incubation period is five or six days, not weeks. But now that a week had passed since the protests and riots began and people were not getting sick, she needed to buy some time. It was an easy game; she knew the press would not ask again.
[TV shill Vin Gupta’s sudden reversal on crowds was even more embarrassing.]
Safety Makes a Comeback in June
In May, the message had been, Although you have survived so far, what happens next will kill you. During the protests and riots of early June, we were apparently safe from the virus. But very quickly, the press resumed the story of bad governors and dangerous citizens ignoring media-approved “experts.” Almost unbelievably (if predictably), the headlines now implied that socializing, going to a barbeque or a July 4th picnic, would kill us and bring about a new wave of lockdowns. Street violence was safe but frisbee golf was dangerous.
The articles were information-free but the headlines were dire. Experts warn. Second wave. Things are spiking. Hospital beds. It sounded as if something was happening, but the details were missing. Every headline tried to scare, and the stories almost always featured red states. The headlines no longer talked about fatalities, only “cases.” States “reported” things and saw “increases” of things. Yet deaths continued to decrease.
[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.]