You know what I mean. Signs on the floor saying to social distance, or only go in one direction down the aisle. Wall dispensers and bottles of soapy goo. That sort of thing. Still see a lot of these “ghostly remnants”?
Several public buildings here still have free paper face masks available in the lobby.
My employer still has facemasks and hand sanitizers everywhere.
I think that’s intentional though. It’s the new norm.
There’s some Mom and Pop shops that closed during covid. Those properties are still vacant.
I still see signs encouraging distancing.
I had a doctor’s appointment today and everyone there was wearing masks (well, the staff; I think some other patients in the waiting area were unmasked).
My wife had a doctor’s appointment in a hospital yesterday. They insisted that everybody be masked. They gave away free masks.
A sports bar I often go to still has two or three hand sanitizer dispensers. They were never there before Covid.
The local corner store and the liquor store next to it still have those spots on the floor, indicating the correct spacing for social distancing.
Just a few weeks ago I took down an old poster at work about how to prevent the spread of “2019-nCoV”.
I find a sometimes surprising number of websites for tourist-y places, still have information about Covid protocols that I strongly suspect they aren’t enforcing.
The elementary school I attended as a kid still has polka dots marking six feet apart on the sidewalk next to it.
I’m still mainly working from home, but I had to go into the office last week. They still have signs on all the entrances saying not to enter the facility if you have a fever (They have taken down the “masks required” signs, though), signs in the restrooms with instructions on how to properly wash your hands, and hand sanitizer everywhere.
And they’re still sending out email notifications every time an employee tests positive for COVID; if you were in such and such building on such and such date you may have been exposed sort of thing. I just got one less than an hour ago.
Where do you live, that that’s a covid thing? Around here, public restrooms have always had signs on how to wash hands.
And I don’t think that masks being available, or hand sanitizer dispensers, are “ghost artifacts”, like the OP was asking about. But a sanitizer dispenser that’s been empty for two years, and is still sitting there, would be.
It was only a year or so ago that the “How to prevent spread of SARS-CoV19” sign next to the mailboxes in the lobby of my apartment building came down. It was from the very early days, when the best advice anyone had was “wash your hands often” (even though we now know that that’s almost completely irrelevant for covid specifically).
On Saturday I saw footprint decals on the sidewalk in front of a Phone store; placed 6 feet apart.
These signs were put up right after the pandemic started, clearly in response to it. I suppose it is still useful information even now, though.
That may be required by state or local law.
But, yes, I still see the floor markings six feet apart, or sometimes just the residue from where the markings used to be.
Yeah, ghost artifacts are common. Both IRL around here (Greater Miami) and on the travel-related parts of the web. Fewer all the time though. Lots of long-empty sanitizer dispensers.
Substantially nobody takes any precautions around here. Seeing a mask on a customer or a person in public isn’t quite double-take-worthy but it is odd enough to stand out as eccentric.
I see cashiers and counterpeople and suchlike in various places wearing them, but even so it’s 1 in 10 or 20, and certainly not something enforced universally on the staff by their management.
Pre-COVID, I only saw them in restaurants and supermarkets - and they seem to be addressed to the staff. Now they are everywhere.
I see a ghost lack-of-artifact: waiting rooms in all sorts of places used to be supplied with reading matter; usually piles of old magazines. They all disappeared during the height of covid, presumably with the intent of reducing surfaces that would be touched by multiple people. In most places, they haven’t come back.
That may have to do with an assumption that everybody has plenty to read and/or watch on their phones. My phone, however, has a screen about 1 1/2 inches square that, at least with my eyes, is useless for reading more than a few words and for watching anything I would want to watch. I try to remember to bring something to read.
There a lot of public restrooms that remind me of the fear of touching door knobs that peaked during COVID-19: they installed those little hook-like things at the bottom of doors so you can open the door with your foot. There were a few around before 2020, but they are so very common since then.
I still see plexiglass dividers in a lot of places that didn’t have them pre-Covid. I know I kept mine on my desk long after studies saying that they were ineffective at best came out, just because it was so nice to have something that kept people from just reaching over and grabbing things off my desk or trying to peer at my computer screen.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my grocery store put arrows on the floor showing which way you were supposed to go down the aisles in order not to come face to face with anyone. They gave that system up by the fall of 2020, but you can still see where they were.
We still have posters recapping the basic rules on my workplace’s walls. They were designed by a very famous local cartoonist, and I remember that they were one of the very first Covid Artifacts that I noticed when I started working on site again once a week. That was in mid-May 2020 at the latest, so they’ve been hanging there for close to 4 years now.
As I’m typing this, I can see the plexiglass divider that I used to have on my desk. It’s been on the floor for a while now.
Hand sanitizers, however, have mostly disappeared, except in a few meeting rooms.