As Covid-19 Spreads, Will It Be Dangerous to Grocery Shop?

I did a mental exercise in comparing chances of exposure to Covid-19 in two hypothetical outings I might take in a community that has some level of the infection spreading.  One outing is going to Safeway to buy 20 grocery items like apples and boxed pasta.  The other outing is attending a church service followed by coffee hour.   Don’t go to church?  Then replace it with some other social gathering with people surrounding you for a time.  Say the Symphony with an intermission.  To  be comprehensive, let’s examine them each of these outings for a combination of both fomite-based exposure and respiratory-droplet exposure.

Safeway:  I grab a cart and take the disinfectant tissue to wipe the cart handle and my hands.  I enter through doors that open automatically.  I pick up items such as pasta in a box and apples that, even if they were touched by another person, it was hours and hours if not days ago and any Covid-19 virons, as a fatty-enveloped virums, probably died from desiccation and temperature changes a good while before I touched the item.  In the aisles, there are at most 1 or 2 other shoppers, 10 or 30 feet from me — not too much exposure to their respiratory droplets.   At checkout I pick my items from my basket and place them on the checkout conveyor belt, but I’m not touching any surfaces, and there’s at least 4-5’ between me and the other people in the checkout line.  I advance to the Point-of-sale terminal, which I do not have to touch, but simply wave my Apple Pay iphone or insert my credit card and withdraw it.   Perhaps I have to pick up a pen and sign the screen, but I can use my finger nail for this too.  My items are placed into my bags by either my hands or the bagger’s hands.   I guess I’ll bag my own groceries, though I could also just make a mental note that at home, when I unbag my groceries and place them away, I should wash my hands again, which I should do after any outing anyways.   All-in-all, it’s a pretty low transmission experience.

Church:  I open a door by my hand—50 other members have touched that same door handle in the previous 15 minutes before service starts.  Yipes, that’s worse than an elevator button!  I sit shoulder to shoulder, row to row with 100 or 200 other people for an hour, sitting, standing, singing — lots of chances for respiratory droplets, seems like we have an average spacing of 1-3 feet.  We greet each other at some point but that we do with elbows and fist bumps (because we’re trying to be safe).   After the service I go to the bathroom and touch these surfaces that were recently touched by dozens of others:  door handle (twice), flush handle, stall handle, faucet handles.   At coffee hour I use the black lever on the coffee urn to fill my mug (the coffee urn lever has had 100 touches in last 10 minutes!) and then I pick up the half-n-half container (30 touches in last 10 minutes), and I mingle more at close speaking distance in midst of scores of others.  Hopefully no hand shaking.   (note:  hmmm…. at this point I remember that the initial hot spot in South Korea was a church…).

Conclusion:   grocery stores shopping outings are pretty safe, but I’m going to shut down church visits for a month or two as part of my civic duty for Bay Area social distancing!

~~ Robert Carr