Today’s trip to the post office coincided with the first day of the next phase of the pandemic. Restaurants and stores are able to open, but need to limit the number of people they serve.
I didn’t notice anything new open on Riverside, but I’ll admit I was paying more attention to traffic.
What I did see was that one of the strip developments had plywood boards over all its windows. Its retail spaces never were completely filled, and what ones were used were not essential businesses. I don’t know if each of them failed, or if the owner wasn’t able to pay his creditors.
One thing the slow down in business has revealed is the precarious nature of many companies. The big ones that filed for bankruptcy, like Hertz and some retailers, had been purchased by vulture capitalists and had so much debt their demises were a matter of time. Coronavirus simply speeded up the inevitable. [1]
One other thing I saw was a truck in front of one of the restaurants filled with tables and chairs. I assume the restaurant was sending furniture into storage to make it easier to comply with the rules about occupancy and table spacing.
I stopped at one drug store to see if they had something back in stock. They didn’t. When I was there May 15 the cashier still wasn’t wearing a mask and wasn’t protected by a plexiglass shield. Today, that had changed.
It’s hard to find out the exact conditions for reopening. I’m sure business owners have drilled down on websites and read documents. I learned more from an announcement on the radio than I did looking on the internet. The radio said people were required to wear masks when they were out in public. That may be what finally forced the drug store to act.
More people were wearing masks. The exceptions included the usual young men alone or with other young men. If they were with women, they seemed to have on masks.
The other group I saw without masks were in the parking lot of a dollar store. Economics is still a factor. My latest box of fifty masks cost $23.39. If one is poor or has had household members lose jobs, that’s a lot of money.
In addition, there’s the problem of availability. I bought mine from Amazon. To do that, I had to have a computer, a computer connection, and a credit card. If you don’t have a computer, the public library used to be available, but isn’t due to the lock down.
I didn’t bother to see if the drug store had any for sale. The effect of the virus is to curtail my curiosity. I go in, pick up what I intend, and leave as quickly as possible.
The masks should have been an improvement over my paper ones. They claimed to be composed of three layers. But of what? It wasn’t on the box. It was made in China and didn’t have to conform to our labeling requirements.
I found a slip of paper at the bottom labeled "certificate." It indicated the "non-medical disposable mask" was composed of "non-woven fabric, melt-blown fabric." That tells me something about the manufacturing process of Zhenjiang Fox Outdoor Products, but nothing about the raw materials.
It didn’t fit as well as my paper one. It was made for a bigger head. It sagged from the ear loops and the piece that’s supposed to pinch down over the nose didn’t work well. I managed to make it reasonably tight at the the top, but I couldn’t do anything about the opening at the bottom.
When I was standing outside the lobby in the post office, the woman six-feet behind me complained about the smell of a disinfectant. I didn’t smell anything. Either the mask was filtering out odors, or my nose had stuffed up as soon as it detected a problem. It tends to do that.
I did notice, though, that my lips were beginning to burn.
I was wearing my usual going-to-town duds, that included a sweatshirt and rubber gloves. I picked up a long box that I had to hold with both my hands. I set it on the ground to open the trunk of my car. It contained popcorn that I couldn’t get locally, and certainly wasn’t going to be damaged by being dropped.
As soon as I got home, I changed clothes. Then, I brought in the box. By the time I had it in the house, a distance of about thirty feet, I had rashes on both my arms where they had touched the box. I immediately washed them with powdered soap.
Meantime, the area around my lips was beginning to swell. When wiping them with a sanitizing hand wipe didn’t work, I rubbed neosporin antibiotic ointment in the area.
I have no idea what I got into. If it were just my arms, it could have come from the post office parking lot pavement. It it were just my lips, it could have been the unidentified fabric in the masks or an allergic reaction to something I ate. When I eat something that contains traces of penicillin I break out, often fairly quickly. I still suspicious of the generic cheese I’m eating because brown rice isn’t available.
There was nothing on the web about a chemical leak; such information only appears when the consequences are obvious. There were no reports of fires that would have required dropping chemicals. And, so far as I know, no place in the immediate area has been firing teargas at protestors.
The only possibility is that the woman behind me in the post office was right, that some chemical was or had been used. I opened the box that contained food, and hoped all the layers of cardboard protected the contents.
Wikipedia reported four new cases of coronavirus in Rio Arriba county. [2] That brings the total to 48, with 15 in the past fourteen days. It took until April 28 to reach that accumulated number, and we did it again in two weeks.
Sources:
1. Ford Motor sold Hertz in 2004 and Carl Ichan became involved in 2014. JC Crew was bought by TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners in 2011. Neiman Marcus was taken over by Ares Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in 2013.
David Welch. "O.J., Accounting Fraud, Icahn: the Story of Hertz Going Bust." Bloomberg News website. 26 May 2020.
Chris Isidore and Nathaniel Meyersohn. "J.Crew Has Filed for Bankruptcy." CNN website. 4 May 2020.
Nathaniel Meyersohn and Chris Isidore. "Neiman Marcus Files for Bankruptcy." CNN website. 7 May 2020.
2. Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated 1 June 2020.
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