On our way back from Paris, we checked in at JFK and the TWA Hotel to see how COVID-19 was doing in terms of living in the heads of New Yorkers. I was quickly rewarded with the trifecta: outdoors, bearded, masked.
The Lockheed-turned bar is a lot of fun. Note the official encouragement for the drunken business travelers to break out in song during the flight (how may police agencies would be summoned if that happened today?). Also the barf bag reminder about the canine member of the household. Take a look at all of the cylinders that the flight engineer had to monitor.
The pool deck is directly across from a two-level Emirates A380 gate:
Wearing a mask is optional for workers, but quite a few still rely on the non-N95 mask rather than switching to a job that does not entail contact with the infected public:
(The $32 omelet is served without toast; Senior Management’s $20+ eggs came with toast… one piece.)
On the one hand, the folks who run the hotel want to help SARS-CoV-2 thrive by bringing people together in close physical proximity. On the other hand, they also remind visitors to “Stay Safe” by avoiding other humans. In-elevator screen:
What about on the web sites of New York institutions? COVID-19 gets mentioned directly below the menubar on the Whitney’s home page:
It’s the very first thing on the Metropolitan Museum’s home page:
If you don’t click the “x” to acknowledge, the message about masks will be present over every page that you visit.
What if you leave the city? Get your mask in the airport:
New York-based JetBlue reminds folks to “Keep a healthy distance” while deplaning. Note the Fall of Saigon-style conditions that were inevitable once the airline decided to sell 100 percent of the seats. In other words, COVID-19 is serious enough that a lot of warning should be displayed. But COVID-19 is not serious enough to refrain from cramming the airliners to the absolute maximum capacity.
That was the mid-October COVID mindshare situation in New York.
The PPE vending machine fascinates me for several reasons, the first is that I was in the hospital a few days ago and encountered a Scrubport™ vending machine while walking out of an elevator. I had arrived at Scrubport!
https://www.bluesparq.com/IoT-Vending-Machine-Controls.html
https://tinyurl.com/3ey9dw3u
I realized: “This must be one of the big contributors to the proliferation of “medical device companies” run by two septuagenarians who live in the woods in Oregon. They own a few hospital scrub vending machines and call themselves a “medical device company.”
The PPE machine doesn’t show any prices and on closer examination, say that some of the items are “nonsterile.” What does that mean? Someone sneezed all over them before sealing up the bags of KN-95s of unknown origin and placing them in the machine?
Did you venture to use a crappy credit card to find out how much that junk costs?
BTW the URL on the machine is https://www.vendingcustomerservice.com/ and you can see what you get when you go there. Looks like it’s run out of Beijing, where the Chinese leadership is very interested in Americans staying safe with their credit cards.
Funny story: As I was making my way into the hospital the other day, of course I needed to pass the COVID mask desk, wherein the hospital requires everyone to remove their old masks and pick up a new, virtually useless cloth mask. The guy at the table was wearing his but it was pulled down under his nose the entire time as he handed them out to the afflicted. I said to him:
“Do these really help?”
“Oh, absolutely! That’s why we require everyone to wear a new one.”
About 20 seconds later it dawned on this dude that he had his mask pulled down the whole time and I watched him nudge it back up.
Phil — I don’t think you really understand the masking thing. It has nothing to do with health. It just means that the wearer didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2020 & wants others to know that.
Beware the AVGAS, JET-A1 variants of covid, transmitted in airport fumes. They make you 7ft tall & bald.