As more of them die, grocery workers increasingly fear showing up at work
We need cultural changes.<p>More self checkout.<p>More automatic sliding doors.<p>Better designed public bathrooms similar to Walmart bathrooms: No door at all; choice between paper towels and hot air hand dryer; touchless faucets and automatic flush toilets.<p>Hand sanitizer at every cash register.<p>Better training for cashiers. Cashiers who do things like lick their fingers to open bags have long been the bane of my existence because I have a compromised immune system.<p>What we are doing now is not the way it has to be. PPE is not the optimal solution.<p>I think we have our priorities backwards. We emphasize the hell out of hand washing. It&#x27;s number one on the list of &quot;five things&quot; the WHO is encouraging people to do to stop the spread.<p>Number three is &quot;Stop touching your face.&quot; That should be the top priority. It&#x27;s prevention.<p>Emphasizing hand washing as more important than &quot;stop touching your face&quot; is implicitly telling people &quot;It&#x27;s okay to expose yourself. Just use soap afterwards and everything will be okay.&quot;<p>No, it won&#x27;t. You need to stop touching your face. You need to stop licking your fingers to separate grocery bags.<p>On top of that, you should also wash hands frequently. But washing hands frequently isn&#x27;t enough in the current culture where people are oblivious about the things they touch.<p>When I ask cashiers &quot;Please don&#x27;t do that&quot; or &quot;Please use hand sanitizer now that you have licked your fingers&quot; they sometimes tell me they didn&#x27;t do what I just watched them do seconds ago. They do it so habitually, they aren&#x27;t even consciously aware of it anymore.<p>In some cases, they get belligerent with me. How dare I ask them to practice germ control! How rude!<p>Yes, this was mostly before the pandemic. I&#x27;ve been trying to protect myself from infection for a lot of years. It&#x27;s largely irrelevant to my point.<p>My son told me he saw two people hugging in the parking lot of the grocery store and one of them confusedly asked &quot;Aren&#x27;t we supposed to not hug?&quot; and the other, an older person, dismissed that with &quot;We aren&#x27;t supposed to hug strangers!&quot;<p>Even with their lives on the line, people are failing to get the memo that you can&#x27;t run around touching everyone and everything. This needs to somehow stop and I&#x27;m appalled that the WHO is part of the problem here in that they are emphasizing hand washing as the top priority rather than emphasizing &quot;Keep your hands clean to begin with by not touching every damn thing, especially not your face.&quot;<p>And I don&#x27;t know if the WHO is that stupid and honest to god doesn&#x27;t realize that not touching stuff is the more important thing or if they have studies and yadda and they believe that it is a lost cause to tell people &quot;No, really, <i>stop touching stuff!!!</i>&quot; and hand washing will get more compliance, so they emphasize that.<p>But they have their priorities backwards. We can get this under control, but we have to practice germ control and the messaging we are getting is insufficient.