The Pandemic Kiada

We did not really know a lot about the coronavirus when it begin. Many health professionals, medical historians and social scientists initially compared covid-19 to structurally similar viruses like SARS and MERS, for instance, and hoped that an understanding of SARS and MERS would provide us with a decent tentative understanding of the coronavirus. As the pandemic has gone on and scientists all around the world have studied the coronavirus intensely, our understanding of covid-19 has thankfully increased.

One of the things that scientists have been able to tentatively answer has been how long the coronavirus lives on things like plastic, steel, and on clothes, to chose just a few examples, all things many of us were concerned about when the pandemic hit. Soon publications, both online and traditional, both reputable and disreputable, both scientifically calm and sensationalistically maniacal, began providing answers to these questions. The best publications, of course, provided tentative answers to the questions of how long covid-19 lived on plastics, on steel, and on clothes because science, given that new data accumulates all the time on things like the coronavirus, requires a healthy degree of tentativeness along with a replication of scientific claims.

The Guardian and WebMD, for instance, throughout the course of the pandemic, have periodically published articles with tentative and ever expanding answers to some of these questions. A Guardian article dated 4 April 2020, for example, notes that the coronavirus lives on cardboard for twenty-four hours and steel and plastic for 72 hours. The WebMD website, in an article dated 11 June 2020, notes that evidence suggests that the virus lives for two to eight hours on aluminum, twenty-four hours on cardboard, and two to three days on stainless steel and plastic. As for how long the coronavirus lives on clothes, the WebMD website notes the paucity of knowledge on the subject but notes that the coronavirus probably survives on clothes less long than it does on steel and plastic.

So why do I dredge this information up? I do it because in classic Voinovichian fashion some of the places I have shopped during the pandemic have been inconsistent in regard to, for instance, taking returns during the pandemic. Hannaford and Price Chopper, for example, initially refused to take back emptied plastic bottles in their return drop offs. Given that the evidence suggests that the virus lasts for 72 hours on plastic all stores could have taken plastic bottle returns back and let these returned bottles set for 72 hours in the plastic bags that line plastic bottle return machines. Price Chopper and Hannaford didn't do this, one assumes, less for scientific reasons and more for practical reasons. Where are, one imagines they asked themselves, we going to store the returned plastic we take back? Walmart, I discovered today, after I tried to return a pair of pants I purchased that were too small, is still not taking clothes back though they are taking plastic bottles back. Scientifically, this is absurd since it is probable that covid-19 survives less long on clothes than it does on plastic. Again one can only assume that there is some reason other than science for Walmart not taking back clothes since Walmart could let clothes set in storage for 72 hours before putting them back on the shelves if they wanted to.

What makes all of this surreal is that the metal shelves of Price Chopper, Hannaford, and Walmart are stocked with plastic and fabrics, including clothes, of several types. All three likely have hundreds of people coming through their doors everyday wearing clothes whose wearers may have potentially come into contact with the coronavirus. All three have plastic bottles of seltzer sitting on the shelves that have come out of cardboard boxes and that have been stocked by human hands that have possibly come into contact with covid-19. All three have metal shelves that routinely get touched by humans who are possibly infected with coronavirus. Since, I highly doubt that each of these three stores are disinfecting each and every plastic bottle, each and every steel shelf, each and every item of clothing worn in or on the shelves, and each and every cardboard box that comes into the store and which has possibly been touched by the coronavirus, the absurd inconsistency in these practises should be obvious to anyone.

I will grant that those of us who don't farm and consume what we grow and don't make our own clothing need access to food and drink. We also, however, just as we need to purchase items that may have been infected with the coronavirus and which may still have active covid-19 on them, need to return items like seltzer bottles purchased and clothes purchased. That we can buy these items but still cannot return some of them--Price Chopper has recently reopened recycling machines-- shows once again how inconsistent, irrational, and unscientific humans and the institutions and organisations they have created are. Life is indeed absurd.