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A Tale of Two Stores: Coronavirus Infection Vectors
Related: clothing and footwear, Eastern Sierra, health, Mt Whitney area, peak bagging, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
No wonder Coronavirus is spreading.
Store 1, a hardware store, Lone Pine, CA
Clerk puts on fresh disposable gloves on both hands, inserts my card, hands me the touchpad, which I press wearing my own fresh glove. PERFECT.
Store 2, grocery store BiRite Market in Lone Pine, CA
Clerk with visibly dirty gloves handles every one of my purchases (which had to be placed on not very clean looking checkout counter), wrapping both gloved hands with around a group of energy bars, thus ensuring contamination of all of them. All items are now definitely contaminated by whatever is on his gloves, which I watched him use for every prior customer, and look not to have been changed since the start of the day.
Another clerk with filthy stained dirty gloves then bags my groceries in fresh plastic bags which he had just handled with the filthy gloves. If Coronavirus was present, my groceries now are all contaminated with it.
Knut H writes:
Dump the groceries somewhere in your van, where warm air can blow over them. Wait 8 hours. Your problems should be solved. Corona is very sensitive to a dry environment. Drying inactivates the virus. We have had virologists retest the hypothesis that Corona can last 9 days... It didn't materialize. Maybe under optimal conditions, moist, wet... Definitely not under normal conditions. Be prudent. Keep things you get in stores dry.
DIGLLOYD: interesting advice... sunlight is presumably good also (ultraviolet light). Heat is not good for vegetables and chocolate, but that aside, the humidity is about 10% here near Lone Pine, and temperature was in the 60's °F in my van... though it's now 28°F at 6800' elevation.
I was not all that alert at the store, or I would have asked to have the clerk put on fresh gloves and let me scan. But I was sleep deprived and groggy from several nights of trying to get a mouse out of my van half the night (which has really screwed me up all day each day). I hate to use glue board traps or kill wildlife when unnecessary, but tonight that mouse will meet his maker I hope—besides poop and Hantavirus risk and eating my food and chewing wires, I’ve had enough. Update: that mouse lived in my van for six days, but it finally left on its own, and I killed two more with traps in ensuing weeks.
