Don’t know whether this counts, Church of St. Catherine, Brussels, the birthplace of surrealism:
The Holy Hand Sanitizer of Antioch!
Hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere. Plexiglass barriers that didn’t have them before. These are what come to mind for me.
Not sure if “ghost artifact” is the right word here. These are practices that pre-dated Covid and still serve those same purposes. Covid just made us care more about it, and they’re not very offensive, and they still provide some value, so they’ll probably be around forever.
My pet peeve anti-artifact is that salt and pepper shakers have disappeared from restaurant tables. In so many places you need to ask for them now. Which I always think to do just after the server has set down our plates, turned tail, and fled.
It a bit unclear to me which practices / devices you’re referring to, but sanitizer dispensers, barriers, and “stay 6’/2m apart” markings were utterly absent from the world I inhabited prior to early 2020. And I travelled for work and now travel in retirement pretty extensively, so my sample set is much larger than just my local town.
It’s also unclear to me that any of these artifacts are used or obeyed now by any appreciable fraction of the populace. Yes, I can’t avoid “using” the plexiglass barrier between me and some random cashier. But those seem few and far between and are slowly disappearing from simple attrition.
I have a drawer full of multi-colored masks, but the thing I see every day is the mask I have hanging from my turn signal lever. It’s been there now for YEARS, not months, and I haven’t swapped it out for a clean one in many months, so it must be covered in accumulated dust. I’m going to take it in when I get home, wash it over the weekend, and return it to its post.
Should I retire the hanging mask altogether? I fear that, if I do, we will have a major outbreak or something new altogether. LOL
When we were in St Martin a couple months ago, the place we stayed still had their signs up about social distancing, etc. They also still had their temperature checking station so you could check your temperature as you walked in/out.
Personally, I still social distance. When someone gets too close to me I move.
I think a bit of that depends on the “world” one inhabits. I saw lot of barriers pre-Covid. They were there for different reasons although Covid made them more plentiful and caused them to pop up in different settings but I’ve been seeing barriers at bank teller’s windows, convenience stores, doctor’s offices , the motor vehicle and other government offices for as long as I can remember. Sanitizer also existed in my world pre-COVID although again in a more limited set of places. Every office of my employer had dispensers and medical facilities and my kids’ grade school and . . . but not stores or casinos.
I even saw masks pre-Covid although mostly that was people of Asian descent. I see more masks now than pre Covid and on all different sorts of people.
I think you should retire it. Since you mentioned it’s a washable mask, I’m assuming it’s cloth and relatively early on, the advice was not to use cloth masks but instead disposable paper ones.
My kung fu school has shadows of the bits of duct tape the instructor put on the mat, to show people where to stand. He put them there when he first re-opened during covid. They’re mostly gone now but it’s taken about 2.5 years.
I noticed recently that several businesses that installed ‘sneeze shields’ for their cashiers have not removed them. Even if COVID had completely vanished they still serve a useful function.
I still see the six feet apart markers on the floor in some stores or fast food places.
Several drive thrus, like the pharmacy and a local BBQ place, still have a large drawer or rotating cylinder through which things are exchanged, rather than direct contact.
My workplace has a hand sanitizer dispenser just inside the main door, but I’m pretty sure it’s empty.
I’m on a national pandemic team for my federal agency. We are still in full COVID mode. We have yet to receive official word from the powers that be to stand down because the continuing COVID evidence is ongoing. COVID cases are still occurring at work, all across the country.
I telework (making work life easy) and I recently went back to wearing a mask for all external stuff (like grocery shopping). My wife and I have all up to date vaccinations. We’re not paranoid. We remain concerned and the COVID data I see from work we take to heart.
One of the libraries I use put handles on the inside of the restroom doors that are designed to be operated with one’s forearm instead of with the hands (though it’s possible to use them with hands.) I very much doubt they’re going to go to the trouble and expense of taking them off and putting the old type back on – plus which, using them as designed reduces general concern about whether the previous user had washed their hands first.
I’d get a box of good N95’s that fit you, and keep a couple of them in the car, wrapped in something that will keep the dust off. (They may come already individually wrapped.) You never know – and if you ever find yourself fleeing a fire in smoky air, or driving through something really dusty, they’ll be useful for that too.
Covid hasn’t gone away at all.
But we are all fooled into saying it’s “over” as it disables us and kills us.
Nobody’s fooled.
It’s just that for those of us who are vaccinated and boosted, there’s not much else to do but go on with our lives, and for those who aren’t, well, they’ve been taking their chances all along.
And FYI, if you are vaccinated and boosted, COVID generally just isn’t that serious. Not enough to really do anything out of the ordinary for it.
And I’m not so sure that your link isn’t a bit conspiracy-theorist, in that if it’s true, why aren’t we hearing more dissenting voices? Instead, we’ve got this one woman publishing her own substack about it, and making claims like there’s no herd immunity, etc… and the literal whole rest of the world saying otherwise.
Plus, that article is kind of cruddy… her articles she cites don’t really support her claim. They’re all about post-COVID ER wait times, and in all the ones I read, they mention COVID, but more along the lines of “a litlte COVID”, not “COVID is overloading our ERs”.
So call me a bit skeptical if she’s the only one saying something different than nearly every other public health person out there. Especially considering she’s basically a professional activist, and NOT a doctor, public health researcher, or anything like that.
Still, there has been some progress. (CDC stops advising five day isolation).
You still see signs in the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) encouraging social distancing and mask-wearing. When you get on the subway, they still play the recorded voice saying masks are recommended.
My doctor’s office (neighborhood clinic) insists on everyone wearing a mask. I still have cloth ones that I launder, the double layer ones with a filter in the middle. There’s an independent toy store down the block from me that had a sign up until very recently that said something to the effect of “We can’t force you, but one of our staff is immunocompromised and we’d really appreciate it if you mask up.”
Overall, not many, but once and a while I’ll spot a window sticker in a shop that was never taken down, and some stores I frequent still have the big plastic barrier at the cash register.
I just got my fifth Pfizer booster today. Gave up on trying to score Novovax from one of the provincial vax sites; I’ll give it a go in six months when I’ll be due for my next booster.
My work installed a bunch of automated hand sanitizer stations around the job site, now almost all of them remain empty.
Last year apparently all the hand sanitizer they bought near the start of the pandemic for the various stations was going to expire so they basically dumped the raw plastic bags on tables with a sign saying they were free to take home.
while there (restaurants) … don’t forget to scan the QR-menu on your phone - b/c those expensive paper menus ain’t coming back, now that everthing is 50% more expensive in that joint and they installed a 15% service charge as they cannot get away with wage-theft anymore!
I grew to dislike restaurants even more, as I feel I get ever more nickel’d-and-dime’d there … and shortchanging is the name of the game.
(I do feel a bit better now ;-))
I’ve been having elbow problems for the last couple of years. The orthopedist I’ve been seeing always sends a text before appointments that asks you (“for your health and safety”) to remain in your car, text “arrived” and wait for further instructions.
Once inside, no one is taking any precautions at all.