When I put on my homely blue 3M dust mask — not an N95, so don’t give me the stink eye — in the parking lot of Safeway here in Rapid City on Saturday, I did it more for them than for me.
And by “them,” I mean anyone I would come within six feet of in the grocery store.
Because the people you meet are the ones who are most protected when you cover your mouth and nose in public. It’s a gesture of good will and common sense, one that can prevent illness and save lives.
But when I put on the mask — the one I hate wearing and only used prior to the COVID when I was sweeping the basement or garage — I’m also providing a measure of protection for myself.
Dr. Anthony Fauci made that dual point Sunday morning on CBS in a conversation with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, who is perhaps the best interviewer on network TV. She asked about his personal mask philosophy, and he said he wore a mask whenever he couldn’t “control” the 6-foot-space that surrounded him.
Like, say, in a grocery store.
And, boy, is that a place where you cannot control the 6-foot space that surrounds you. In Safeway, for example, the signs on the door encouraged shoppers to maintain that safe distance, using an example of two grocery carts.
Some people did that. Most didn’t. My space was invaded regularly, casually, even lackadaisically, as I tried to dodge and swerve and reverse course to protect myself, and them.
About one in 10 people were wearing masks in the store. and the one in ten didn’t include any of the store employees that I noticed, all of whom were pretty consistently within six feet of somebody else and not wearing masks.
So, if we believe Dr. Fauci — and I do — those employees spent their work shift not protecting others and not protecting themselves.
Some of the people shopping that day were clearly focused on their shopping and making it as efficient and brief and physically separated as possible. I was one of those. Others exhibited the same laissez-faire approach to shopping they probably displayed before COVID-19, chatting with others and wandering in and out of others’ space.
In one instance, a mom was shopping with a high-school-aged daughter, and the daughter had no discernible role at all in the shopping. She was simply along to chat with her mom as her mom shopped. Other similar small family or friend groups were there, with people who had no clear reason to be there, other than to chat and reach out from time to time to handle some box or jar.
Checking out the most dangerous point in the store
In doing so they exposed themselves and others to the possibility of virus transmission, for no practical reason. And if you managed to dodge and weave through the aisles in relative safety to the checkout area, you arrived at the most dangerous point in the store.
It presented two choices: Join the line at the single checkout counter operated by a store staffer or take one of the seven self-checkout stations just a few feet away from that line. The seven self-checkout stations are arranged in an island, with three on each side and one on the end. A store employee often stands at a checkout at the other end, in case you need help.
When all seven self-checkouts are in use, it’s practically an elbow-to-elbow experience. And if someone needs help, which someone always does, that adds another person to the crowd and the delay adds to people lined close together behind you.
If you want to spread an easily transmissible disease, you couldn’t design a much-better system, especially when most of the people aren’t wearing masks or gloves. It might have made sense before COVID. It makes no sense now.
Shutting down the two middle stations would help. So, would moving the far-too-close staffed checkout station nearby to the other end of the line of stations, most of which are typically closed.
This isn’t rocket science. And I was amazed that people who are paid to keep customers safe hadn’t already done it. Unless they, too, look at the numbers West River and think we’re safe, somehow. We’re not. Eventually the state reports will show that.
Meanwhile, the masks that Dr. Fauci wears when he knows he won’t be able to control the six feet around him are essential, for him and especially for others. Same goes for us. Fauci would find the situation I ran into in my last shopping trip to be disturbing and contrary to medical advice and, well, common sense.
And speaking of Dr. Fauci, his conversation with Brennan took a turn toward home — ours — near the end of the Face the Nation interview. Brennan named South Dakota and seven other mostly rural states as the last in the nation that didn’t have statewide stay-at-home orders in place.
“Are they putting the rest of the country at risk?” Brennan asked.
To which Fauci responded: “Well, it isn’t that they’re putting the rest of the country at risk as much as they’re putting themselves at risk.”
Surge in cases inevitable everywhere, “sooner or later:
Fauci went on to stress the importance of physical distancing, avoiding groups and wearing masks in public areas, regardless of where you are or what the current infection rates are in your area.
He urged us to do that “to the best of your ability, because this virus doesn't discriminate, whether you're in a small town, in a relatively secluded area of the country versus whether you're in a big city. And sooner or later, you're going to see a surge of cases.”
I was off the grid Monday, social distancing by wallowing around in my chest waders down in Angostura Reservoir, fishing for walleyes and catching smallmouth bass. So, I missed the daily updates on Covid. But catching up online this morning, I saw the highest one-day report so far of new confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Dakota: 48.
Thirty-six of those new cases are in Minnehaha County, bringing the county total there to 140, out of 288 statewide positives. It’s not surprising that Minnehaha County, with the most people and the state’s most densely situated population center, would have the most cases.
But it still makes me worry for family and friends who live there. And it makes me hope that people in grocery and other stores there are taking more precautions than what I saw during my shopping trip Saturday morning.
So far, we’ve been lucky in Pennington County and the more lightly populated West River counties. Sadly, we lost a local citizen here early on in the spread of the disease but haven’t lost any since. And cases are low here, for now. But state epidemiologist Joshua Clayton says we can’t expect them to stay that way.
“I don’t anticipate that (Minnehaha) is going to be the only county that sees additional positive cases in a very rapid manner in that way,” he said. “I think that’s something we need to keep in mind as we move forward.”
I’ll keep it in mind as I move forward down the aisles with my grocery cart, next time I have to go. I hope the people I meet can keep it in mind, too.
