Mask in place, Larry Houston approaches the reconfigured entrance of Walmart in Fairlawn. The store changed the entrance so that customers can be counted, preventing the store from becoming so crowded that social distancing can’t be observed. Approaching customers are also coached to wear masks. Houston is from Florida.
By Pat Brown
Contributing Writer
Merchants and businesses in Virginia have been asked to help control the spread of the coronavirus by insisting that their employees and customers wear masks.
So how is that working out?
On Tuesday, July 14, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam changed his mask request to a mask order, declaring that Virginia merchants and shoppers were required to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. He promised enforcement and said fines could be imposed.
Since that announcement, a check on local big-box and grocery chains as to the extent of compliance with the governor’s order yielded just about what was to be expected: Store workers are meeting the requirement by wearing their masks, and most, but not all, shoppers are wearing their masks in public.
A Saturday afternoon visit to the Food Lion on Roanoke Street for a little shopping showed that all of the store’s employees were wearing masks as they had been doing for weeks. The customers, however, were another matter. Five different shoppers entered the store not wearing a mask.
Home Depot is still offering curbside pick-up, but shoppers who choose to go inside the store will find that the clerks are wearing masks and so is assistant store manager Chuck Kamienski.
“People have been pretty compliant,” he said Monday about the requirements for the masks. Outside the store, customers and workers pushing carts of merchandise proved him right. All were masked, including a family of five making their way to the garden shop.
A few shoppers inside were maskless. Would Kamienski ask the few hold-outs to put on masks?
“As we walk, we talk to them,” he said. It seemed like a friendly enough way to handle the resisters.
Kamienski said the store had stopped counting customers to be certain shoppers were not too numerous for social distancing. “We found we were not exceeding our limit,” he said.
A visit to the Christiansburg Lowe’s turned up two shoppers in orange T-shirts with no masks. An older woman had a mask around her neck, but not over her mouth or nose. Another older woman had no mask.
At the Food Lion on North Main in Blacksburg, one man and one woman weren’t wearing masks while they used the self-checkout registers. Other grocery shoppers were in compliance.
A drive-by observation at Kroger on South Main in Blacksburg, where shopping was light on
Monday morning, revealed only two of 12 people entering and exiting the store without masks.
At Kroger on University Boulevard, six shoppers on the way in or out of the store had on their
Masks. One also had on plastic gloves.
In the Lowe’s at Fairlawn, several people in the front corridor of the store were not wearing masks: two men in the lumber department, three in the tool section and three more moving through the front section of the building. The other side of the store yielded seven more maskless shoppers.
Like the one in Christiansburg, the Fairlawn WalMart has stationed employees to count the number of entering shoppers and to remind them to wear a mask and practice social distancing. The Walmart stores have limited entrance and exit options so that customers can be counted and coached.
Inside the Christiansburg Walmart, all shoppers were masked except for one man, who was speaking agitatedly to two store employees, presumably about a complaint. An assistant manager seemed to calm him, and he left.
What does an employee do if a person gets upset if asked to wear a mask? “I would get someone up from me,” a WalMart employee said, indicating she would ask one of her bosses to handle the situation.
In one store other than the ones mentioned here, a clerk tried to claim that the coronavirus has not killed any more people than would die in a typical flu season. This was certainly wrong. According to statistics from the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 62,000 people may have died from the flu in 2019-20, but that total may be as low as 24,000. As of July 21, the CDC had estimated the number of deaths in the United States from COVID-19 to be 140,630.
Jason Deese, epidemiologist with the New River Health District said the good news is that COVID-19 19 is still largely preventable. “The outdoors is great,” he said. “It’s safe as long as you’re not in a big crowd.”
Part of the reason is that droplets, which spread the virus, cannot build up as much outdoors as they can in a confined, indoor area. To no one’s surprise, he recommended wearing masks in stores and limiting the amount of time shoppers stay in a store.
Countries that got a quick handle on the spread of the virus, like South Korea, used masks consistently from the very beginning of the outbreak in their area, he said.
The New River Health District includes Montgomery, Pulaski, Giles and Floyd counties and
Radford City. According to Dr. Noelle Bissell, the health district’s director, the health district has administered more than 8,300 tests locally since the beginning of the pandemic. Fewer than five percent of those tests have yielded a positive result, she said.
