A Trip To The Store, Late 2020 Edition

Supermarket shopping carts, photo by Massimilianogalardi

I missed this morning’s deadline because reality intruded. I didn’t anticipate the magnitude of that intrusion.

Our electric range died in late October. We purchased a new one which was scheduled to arrive within four days, bypassing more cost-effective options with greater functionality in exchange for the rapid delivery. Instead, after repeat delays, it arrived yesterday.

That triggered a visit to the grocery store this morning. We’ve been using curbside delivery almost exclusively since the beginning of the pandemic, but since the acquisition of some N95 masks, I’ve been willing to venture into grocery stores – specifically, Central Market.

Central Market is a high-end offshoot of a Southwest chain called H-E-B. It carries a variety of items which various members of the family like but which can’t be purchased easily anywhere else. Not the two styles of Iberico ham or eight styles of prosciutto… but the fact that they stock those might give insight as to their selection. No Coca-cola on the shelves, unless it’s in small glass bottles from Mexico. Plenty of organics. Experienced butchers willing to cut meat for you. Expert bakers. Multiple chefs on staff, using any ingredients which are anything less than absolutely fresh to create takeaway meals. It’s what Whole Foods wants to be when it grows up. If you want to spend a stupid amount of money on food, it’s a destination; thankfully, they also stock comparatively cheap items as well, like pork roll or whole bean flavored coffee and some low-priced cheeses. Those are where I tend to aim my cart.

That happens because Central Market’s selection is fairly terrible for curbside delivery, and they are one of the rare supermarkets which continues to charge for curbside pickup in the middle of the pandemic. If you want meat, vegetables or the staple pre-packaged foods, they have it available. If you want what sets them apart – the chef-prepared items, the oddities – you have to go inside.

So: masked in an N95, with rubber gloves, in the first minutes after they opened before any significant viral clouds from lingering shoppers or staffers have had a chance to develop, I entered.

I immediately felt contaminated. This is a place which caters to the well-to-do, staffed by the educated. Everyone was wearing a mask, and only one person in the entire store was wearing it incorrectly. I walked past a shopper in his late 20s/early 30s with an Einstein t-shirt on. I have no doubt that if I started griping about COVID-19 deniers, I’d have heard “Hallelujah-not-that-I’m-implying-primacy-of-any-one-religion!” from the kale display. But they were treating the masks as if they were forcefields; once it was on, they could walk anywhere and stand anywhere and touch anything with impunity. They were safe. They were masked and sciencey.

I couldn’t check the meats, because there were too many people clustered at the counter. On multiple occasions I had to reverse course and head down another aisle because people had decided that personal space was vastly overrated. After maneuvering my way through a viral Pac-man maze full of self-assured shopping monsters, I paid for my specialty items and was out the door.

Throughout the United States, we’ve seen just over one out of every 20 people contract the disease. The numbers are currently at or near record levels in many communities and states. After a dip in cases as people became more diligent, cases are rising again due to a variety of factors, but the primary reason is likely burnout, with complacence running a close second.

I know I’ve harped on this before, but in case there are any new eyes here, posting in the comments or not, I thought I’d bring some basic concepts to the fore again, along with some new ones.

ASSUME THE WORST. Rule one of any pandemic is to assume you’ve got the disease and you need to avoid passing it to anyone else. Rule two of any pandemic is to assume that everyone else has the disease and you need to avoid them passing it to you. Vigilance is our friend.

A MASK DOES NOT MAKE YOU INVINCIBLE. Masks diminish the amount of virus which pass through them by capturing particles. They don’t get everything. An average mask knocks out about half of the particulate; an N95 knocks out about 95%. Because the chance of transmission is directly related to the viral load – the quantity of live virus which accesses susceptible systems – reducing the amount of virus being breathed through a mask drops the likelihood of transfer. But depending on how much virus the infected person is shedding, even if both people are masked a transmission can happen fairly quickly.

SIX FEET IS NOT MAGIC. Viruses don’t suddenly die if they get more than six feet from their original host, as if there’s a high-energy electric fence designed to kill microscopic death balls. The six foot rule is based on the distance that a droplet that doesn’t go airborne typically travels from the mouth of a person who is breathing normally (provided they’re a mouth breather) or speaking at a standard volume. If someone’s singing or shouting or even speaking loudly, that distance increases. Even that ignores the fact that the virus can be spread by airborne transmission of smaller particles, so the six feet of direct contact becomes moot if a person is standing in a place for a couple of minutes and building up a cloud of particles around them. Those clouds have been shown to extend to just over twenty feet with a notable viral load. It takes longer to transmit that way, and it’s fairly moot when dealing with capricious outdoor air flow, but six feet is not automatically a safe distance indoors. The three feet of some European nations, even less so.

VACCINES TAKE TIME. There are two gross misconceptions about vaccines, and both are potentially deadly. First is that they have taken months to develop and they haven’t been properly tested. For the vaccines hitting the market now, they were completed in the first half of the year and they’ve spent the past six months getting tested to check for side effects and to determine proper dosage levels. While there remain questions about how long they will be effective after inoculation, the notion that they haven’t been tested is ludicrous. Equally ludicrous is the second misconception, that the shot will be immediately effective. The vaccine gets a body to start manufacturing antibodies, and those will take weeks and a second shot to develop to the point of conferring a level of immunity. People will remain vulnerable in the first couple of weeks following their shot, and should act accordingly.

SURFACES ARE DANGEROUS. With all of the focus on masks, which can decrease direct transmission and aerosol transmission alike and are the best protection against the spread of the disease, attention has been drawn away from contact transmission. People have stopped wiping down door handles or their mail, stopped being concerned about stuff lingering on the packaging of items dozens of others have handled, and stopped being careful about touching their fingers to their face. This is leading to new cases, as the virus doesn’t particularly care about the vector it uses to enter a new host. Lysol and Clorox remain especially useful, as do rubber or plastic gloves.

VIRUSES AREN’T POLITICAL. If you’re refusing to wear a mask for FREEDOM!, the important part of that statement isn’t the “FREEDOM!”, it’s the “refusing to wear a mask”. You’re increasing the risk to yourself and everyone you contact, including your loved ones, and the statement you think you’re making is being ignored by the virus. It doesn’t care what your positions are on any topic, because the only thing that matters is the opportunity to infect a new host. This was important in the Trump rallies and BLM marches, both of which caused booms in local caseloads, and there is a risk of it happening again during the inauguration. If you want to go to D.C. and hug a stranger… don’t.

The trip today convinced me that it needed to be said once more. With any luck, it’s the last time I’ll be inspired to rant about it.

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About AlienMotives 1991 Articles
Ex-Navy Reactor Operator turned bookseller. Father of an amazing girl and husband to an amazing wife. Tired of willful political blindness, but never tired of politics. Hopeful for the future.