Grocery handling in the time of COVID

This, pretty much.

OP, did you have problems with germophobia or obsessive-compulsive things before? Folks who were already struggling with those issues pre-COVID must be in hell trying to deal now.

The whole Instacart thing seemed pretty shady and exploitative to me, but I think grocery pick up is the best thing since sliced bread. It has to be safer for everyone.

Back to the OP and her subsequent posts.

Your limiting factor is anxiety, not COVID. So IMO you need to do what you can to a) manage your anxiety to reduce it, and b) manage your COVID exposure to meet your anxiety’s limits.

I live in the ultra-high COVID area of Greater Miami Florida. I’ve been wearing my N95 religiously for months. I avoid crowds and indoor restaurants without exception. I’ve taken leave from my public-facing work for months now to reduce my exposure. I take the total COVID risk very seriously.

I’m 62 with some extra risk factors with a 65 year old wife with massive extra risk factors. What I’m doing to manage our total risk profile makes sense to me in my environment.

The precautions I take with my groceries are … NONE.

I limit my own going shopping to off peak times in stores that are therefore nearly empty. And I only go once a week to one store, not 3x/week to 3 different stores for this or that as I used to.

But once I get to my one store that one time, I put my stuff in the cart, pay for it, take it home, and put it away exactly as I did 1 year ago pre-COVID. The early reporting about the infectiousness of contaminated surfaces was lousy rushed science that got waay more press than it rated.

I suspect your anxiety is a bigger health problem for you now than COVID is. Unmanaged anxiety causes all sorts of bad stuff in the body. Get the help you need to address that before it harms you permanently.

I have always been challenged by a need sometimes to try to control my environment in order to make it manageable for me or to protect myself from risk, sometimes to a fault, but this whole thing has brought out some kind of…extra…in me. All of this in addition to recently turning 50 and also newly confronting illness/death (not from this virus) in my own family.

I have been working with a therapist for several years now, and am grateful for her counsel during this. She has expressed concern that I may be going too far with control measures, but I could say she’s being too lax, so who knows? She would like to see me ease some of my restrictions including trying to hole up at home until every last % of risk is gone (impossible, but I do feel a sense of taking on a challenge, like “just watch me wait this out!”). And yes, the stress of ALL of this has been unhealthy for me.

However, I’ve gotten off of social media, I limit news sources (Reuters and AP only), I limit my time here, and have been reading and cooking more, as well as other projects. And exercise, 5-6x/week. So, I’m trying.

But still, I worry about groceries, lol.

I don’t do any of that stuff. I wear my mask when I go to the store, and that’s it. I do go early in the morning (usually once a week) to avoid the crowds.

I don’t use those wipes or hand sanitizers. And I pretty much only wash my hands after using the bathroom; and I probably touch my face a dozen times a day.

Admittedly, it’s low around here. I still think contact transmission doesn’t seem something you need extreme measures to protect against.

I’m going to the store a couple times a week. I prefer shorter trips to ONE BIG GIANT shop, where I’m bound to be disappointed by selection. If I do two small ones, I get less anxious because I say to myself “Oh I’ll just come back on Thursday.” It’s not now or never.

I wear a mask and wipe down the cart. I use self check whenever possible. When I get home I wash my hands and use wipes on (or I wash the outside with dishsoap) everything that has to be in the fridge/freezer. Everything that won’t spoil or melt stays on the porch for a couple days. It’s not that big of a hassle. And if I decide “Oh I want the pasta that’s out there” I will go get it carefully. It sets my mind at ease. I don’t care if I look back later at how silly I was, how much I overreacted. That means I made it through.

I’m in NC, so pretty high infection rate here. I do an every other week “big shop” at the regular grocery store, which I pick up. I do a once a week small in-person shop at Trader Joe’s for fresh veg/fruit and things like that. When I get home, I wash what I can in soap and water and wipe other stuff down with a wipe. I was thinking about relaxing that a bit until a guy was kicked out of my local grocery store for licking packages. I might continue my cleaning routine for eternity now.

I don’t take your level of precautions, but I live in a lower isk area. I tried curbside and delivery early on, but it just didn’t work for us.

I go in a mask, wipe down the cart handle (if someone isn’t doing it for me), I use hand sanitizer before I go in, and if I touch my face I use it again (mainly to protect others from me). I use regular checkout because I usually have too much for self checkout. I typically am going once a week or less now, down from 2 to 3 times per week before. I hand sanitize before getting back in my car, and then wash hands when I get home.

But, I don’t take any precautions with the groceries themselves, except that I am buying more bagged or clamshelled produce than I otherwise would.

All that said, I don’t think your precautions are crazy. However, I think you should consider whether you need to all of it. Quarantining the groceries should be enough, and disinfecting them should be enough. I don’t see a need for repackaging at all. Can you pick either of those – whichever feels most effective/satisfying – and drop the redundant one?

This.

I do most of the shopping, and the only difference between now and pre-covid is that I put a mask on before I enter the store (and remove it right after I get outside). There are four stores that I shop at regularly (commissary, Super WalMart, Aldi, and BJ’s) – usually at least two of them every week – and four others that I visit occasionally if they have good sales (Stop & Shop, ShopRite, McQuade’s and Big Y). Haven’t been to the Indian grocery in several months, but once a month or so I do check Ocean State Job Lot to see what goodies they have.

I mainly have the grocery store, and on Sunday mornings I do my laundry at the laundromat. I’m there first time when the lady opens. And the occasional trip to the drugstore to pick up something on sale or pick up my prescriptions.

Wear the mask in and take it off when I leave.

This is the prevailing current advice, with which I agree, and it was reinforced by a discussion I heard just today on the radio with an infectious disease specialist. Personally I don’t actually do anything much different with groceries than I’ve always done, except that I’m a bit more wary of fresh fruits and vegetables sold without packaging. I’ve always washed them before use (just in plain cold water); now I just do it a bit more thoroughly. The only real difference is I always wear a mask when shopping (and now, so does everybody else). In the past on a few occasions I also sometimes wore latex gloves, but that’s now entirely unnecessary since I and virtually all establishments have large quantities of hand sanitizer available, many stores offering hand sanitizing stations both on entry and exit.

For something like tomatoes I wash them thoroughly and wipe them dry, and for onions, I just make sure they’re well peeled so that all the orginally exposed surface area is gone. Onions are often cooked but sometimes, as with burgers or hot dogs, used raw as a garnish. I’m still alive. :slight_smile:

IMO you don’t need to feel bad about being too cautious when the stakes are legitimately high. You’re wise to tune out those who think it’s a hoax. And if your routine makes you feel more secure, as long as it doesn’t consume your whole waking life or interfere too much, I think it’s fine. Self-preservation is a basic instinct and deserves priority. I’m glad you recognized that it can be a disproportionate issue and are talking to a counselor who can help you find a balance. Good luck!

Since you’re asking an opinion rather than a pile of stats, I’ll just say that I have continued to do my own weekly grocery shopping, just like always. When I get home, I wash my hands and then put my groceries aways, just like always. The only difference is now I wear a mask.

If you practice good hygiene (well, maybe better than before) then you are very unlikely to catch the virus even if it is on surfaces you touch. The virus cannot penetrate the skin of your hands. It has to get into your respiratory system. Even if active virus is on food packaging or produce surfaces (and this seems to be unlikely but I don’t have numbers), it is not going to jump up and start flying around. Rinsing food before preparing it and washing hands before eating would mitigate this.

Not an expert opinion, just my opinion, but that’s what you asked for.

This is 100% me. Can’t hurt, might help. We have high-risk people here and anything I can do to possibly thwart this thing, I do it. If it makes you feel better, xanthous, keep doing it. The only downside is a little time lost.

Well, I was wondering how @xanthous partner/ housemates might feel about these procedures. Driving your wife up the wall is a downside consideration. :kissing_heart:

I wasn’t sure what this meant, but just to be clear, no it cannot penetrate the skin of your hands, but it can enter through any of your mucous membranes to eventually get to your respiratory systems.

I meant that you cannot contract the virus simply by getting on your hands. It would have to move from your hands into your respiratory system. Don’t pick your nose if you haven’t washed your hands first. (This is one reason that I don’t bother to wear gloves. Getting virus on your hands isn’t worse than getting it on the gloves.)

We live in a high-COVID area of a high-COVID county. And because of my age and health issues I’m at very high risk. If I get this virus I’m a dead man.

At first, my husband did all the shopping, since he’s 20 years younger than I am and in relatively good health. But if he gets it I get it, so it doesn’t matter which of us catches it first.

We don’t go out at all, except for grocery shopping. And we go early, during “high-risk” hours, no more often than once a week. Always wear masks, of course, and wipe down the cart handles. And back out of an aisle when we see someone without a mask. When we get home we wipe down all fridge/freezer items with Clorox wipes, and leave the rest in a corner of the kitchen for four days, just to be sure.

This may be overkill, but so far we’re both virus-free, so we’ll continue doing this as long as we think it’s necessary.

Early on in the pandemic, my wife got a little overly cautious about the grocery handling thing. Bring the bags in, put them on the counter here, take everything out and wipe it down and put it on the counter over there, remove grocery bags from the counter, wipe down the counter where they were sitting.

She even tried doing the ordering online thing, but the store did a horrible job of substituting items they were out of, and we got some nasty produce. So she gave up on that. Later she read that the virus doesn’t live on surfaces as long as they first thought - those were laboratory conditions, not real world. So grocery shopping is pretty much back to normal.

I do grab a wipe on my way in and wipe the cart handle down, since they don’t seem to have a full time grocery cart cleaner stationed at the entrance now.

The thing I don’t get is that they still won’t bag my groceries if I bring my own bags. My bags are probably cleaner than half the stuff they’re picking up and running across the scanner, but whatevs. (And maybe it’s the passive-agressive part of me that has decided that if they don’t want to bag my groceries, fine… But don’t expect me to bust my ass bagging them when there is someone waiting behind me in line.)