Wait Here

There is a bookstore, not terribly far from where I live, and I was driving past and decided to stop in. It's an interesting space; the upper floor of a small indoor shopping area of what is otherwise a split-level strip mall. The bookstore takes up one side of  the area, the other being what's left of the food court. (As one may surmise, many of the food sellers have closed up shop.) And there is no wall between the food court and the bookstore. There is a long, low row of shelves that semi close off the space, with two gaps that allow for people to enter and exit. Sight lines are clear and sounds carry.

When I entered the food court, I saw that there were a number of people waiting to enter the bookstore, perhaps as many as two dozen, standing in little clusters, distancing from one another. I looked onto the sales floor, thinking that the bookstore must have been fairly crowded. I could count five people. I presume there were others in places that I couldn't see because of shelves or other objects that blocked line of site, but at first glance, it seemed likely that there were more people in line to enter than were actually in the space. And it wasn't a small space; it's somewhere in the area of 15,000 square feet. Granted, it's not as large as the average Barnes and Noble, but it was still a pretty good size.

But here were some twenty-plus people, standing in a small area of the food court, waiting to enter a much larger space, where there would have been barriers between them as they moved through the shelves. It was a fairly unusual arrangement, but that's what made it stand out for me. If the line had been outside, one could make the point that the greater air circulation would have made it less likely that a sick person may have infected anyone else. But that wasn't the case here. And it drove home for me what could be one reason why despite everything that people are being asked to do, things haven't really improved. Maybe certain precautions are being enacted by rote, without any real understanding of what they're supposed to accomplish.

To be sure, I don't blame the bookstore owners. They were likely following state restrictions to the letter. But here was a circumstance where those restrictions were likely worse than useless. Of anyone in the line had been sick enough to be infectious, making them stand in one place and then forcing other people to wait near them and then pass through that same space seems that it would have the potential to cause more infections than just letting people into the space. After all, they were already in the building, and the store was more than large enough for the various groups of shoppers to keep their distance from one another.

 In the end, the whole thing struck me as illustrative of what has always plagued the United States as concerns this outbreak. The official response seems to always be just that, a response. Cobbled together as things unfold and then simply pushed out to everyone, rather than planned in advance and tailored to the circumstances as they are likely to be in certain places. Maybe it's unrealistic to think that it's possible to get ahead of all of this. Part of me hopes that's true.