Journal of the Plague Year 12

 

The mask mandate has ended in St. Paul and Minneapolis though I suspect that at airports, in planes, and at hospitals masks will still be required. Yesterday I noted that the signs demanding the wearing of masks in order to enter many shopping facilities had been taken off the entry doors; at the supermarket where I shopped the cashiers and baggers were not wearing masks, and neither were many of the customers. I still wore mine and will continue to do so when entering any indoor public premise. Such accoutrement has become habit.

But as the pandemic abates, I begin to wonder what is to be done with the hundred or so masks still stacked in my front closet? For the past sixteen months I have not left my front door without grabbing for a mask to put on. For the whole fifteen months whenever I walked through my front door, I walked masked. In the glove compartment of my car, I had kept a supply of masks for emergency entrances or exits. But my goodness, this whole sixteen months has been one long emergency! And what should I do with the box of plastic gloves that, too, sit on shelves beside the masks at my front door; where shall I store the very large plastic bottle of hand sanitizer that sits now prominently placed on a kitchen counter, and the several containers of hand wipes, what is now to be done with them? I acknowledge that I stopped wearing the disposable gloves months ago, and I did tend to forget to sanitize my hands whenever I returned from food shopping or from my walks, or when I received the latest package from Amazon home delivery; and even though the mask mandate has been removed, the masks remain on the shelves as do the gloves and hand sanitizers. I think that I should decide what must be done with them for the sake of space economy. These accessories are all placed strategically throughout my home and they do take up not an inconsiderable space in a limited environment. And all over my home are masks worn once or twice but not placed for easy access in anticipation of the next outing. But now what is to be done with these surpluses? Stored in anticipation for the next pandemic?

In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe’s narrator, HF, describes the end of the plague occurrence in London in 1665. “It was now . . . the people had cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast; indeed, we were no more afraid now to pass by a Man with a white Cap upon his head, or with a Cloth wrapt round his Neck, or with his Leg limping, occasion’d by the Sores in his Groyn, all which were frightful to the last Degree, but the week before.” For us, the end of the mask mandate suggest to too many that the plague is gone and no longer a threat. But unmasked everyone remains a potential threat: no one at the doors to the supermarket checks to see who has been vaccinated; and besides, even vaccinated a person might still possess the virus that can be passed on through the air. HF is not at peace with the seemingly sudden casting off of caution and is not comfortable with the ease with which people have returned to their former lives as if nothing had occurred. He writes, “[B]ut I must own, that for the Generality of the People it might too justly be said of them, as was said of the children of Israel, after their being delivered from the Host of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red-Sea, and look’d back, and saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the water, viz. That they sound his Praise, but they soon forgot his Works.” Forgetting has become the order of the day.