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Abe's avatar

My favorite (read: most frustrating) pandemic theater example is on my TV screen every evening since the NCAA tournament started.

College basketball coaches are (seemingly) told to wear masks while they're on the sidelines coaching their teams. From what I've seen, all have dutifully complied. However! As soon as the game starts and they need to do their jobs, these coaches routinely, and almost without fail, will pull down their (mostly cloth) masks to shout loudly at their players and at the referees. It makes wearing the masks the rest of the time nearly irrelevant! Why even have them wear masks if they're going to pull them down and aerosolize every few minutes anyways? It's not protecting them OR the people around them!

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Antonia Malchik's avatar

That ending is the funniest thing I've read in a while (and I've spent this whole year watching my daughter and her cousins and their occasional friend visits develop their own versions of "pandemic" involving distancing) but also I somehow had no idea you had a kid and am now not-very-usefully ruminating on the question "How does Zeynep get so much done?!"

I homeschooled my kids, so we didn't witness any of the theater in the classrooms, though I'm sure there was plenty. A doctor friend of ours did call my spouse somewhere during lockdown last spring to ask how long he though he should microwave his newspaper for. Though as in your first examples, fair enough back when when we didn't know very much.

My mother-in-law was in a rehabilitation facility in the UK for a few months this winter, where there was plenty of hygiene theater from the care staff, but a dementia resident in the home wandered around at will all the time, and came into my mother-in-law's room almost every day and sat on her bed thinking she was a relative. Which is how my mother-in-law got Covid. Luckily she'd had the AZ vaccine a few days before she got the virus, so it (we think) mitigated the effects, though she was still very sick.

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