4 things I’m keeping in the post-pandemic world

Even though my life is beginning to get back to normal thanks to the vaccines, there are at least four things I would like to do differently going forward.

Back to normal-ish

After the lockdown started last March I was able to stay home for the better part of a year, getting everything delivered, staying safe while other people kept the city running. I was incredibly lucky, never really having to put myself at risk.

Now, my family is fully vaccinated. More than half of the adults in my state have gotten at least one vaccine shot, and more than one-third are also fully vaccinated. The vaccination numbers in my zip code are good (although nowhere near as good as I would like).

And thanks to those vaccines, I’m back to doing routine, pre-pandemic things, like making multiple grocery store trips each week, riding the subway, and eating at restaurants (albeit outside).

But just because things are getting back to normal, that doesn’t mean I want everything to go back to the way it was. I’m embarrassed to say that I was never comfortable with the way certain things were done, but I didn’t try to change them because they were just so ingrained in society.

In many ways, the pandemic gave us a clean slate for certain behaviors, and I’m going to do my best to restart in a way that makes more sense to me.

There are four specific things that I started doing because of the pandemic that I hope to carry over into the post-pandemic world.

Blowing out candles on a special mini-cake

My daughter turned sixteen early in the lockdown. At the time, I remember thinking what horrible luck that her birthday fell during what I was sure would be just a two- or three-month situation.

We did what we could to make her birthday fun and meaningful, but without being able to go anywhere or have a party, there wasn’t much we could do. We did let her best friend come over, with every precaution we could think of in place.

She had asked for sushi and two cakes, and when your sixteenth birthday has been otherwise ruined by a pandemic, you get what you want for dinner. I picked up sushi, and I made the cakes, plus a cupcake to hold a candle. At that early stage of the pandemic, we were trying to be as careful as possible, and I didn’t want her best friend eating cake that had been blown on. And that concern got me wondering why this had been OK before COVID-19.

It always struck me as weird that as a society, we had decided that it was perfectly fine to let someone—often a germy kid—blow all over a cake, and then we ate it. If you saw someone blow all over a sandwich on a buffet table, would you then grab it and eat it? No! But we had totally given a pass to birthday cakes.

So, I used a little of the cake batter to make a cupcake (I used a cupcake pan, but you can also just use a foil cupcake liner without a pan). And that’s where the candle went!

A few months later, still under lockdown, I did the same for my son’s nineteenth birthday, but with two cupcakes that time, since we had number candles for his cake.

Now, based on what we know about how COVID-19 is transmitted, I don’t think there’s much of a chance that someone could get sick from spit landing on a cake. But it’s still a pretty gross tradition when you think about it, one that I don’t really want to continue. If it’s just the four of us celebrating—like it was this week for my daughter’s seventeenth birthday—then I probably won’t bother making a separate “candle cake” (I mean, if I’ll share a water bottle with someone, then I shouldn’t let myself get too grossed out by them blowing on frosting).

But when other people are going to be present? We’ll be having candle cupcakes, or a mini-cake, whatever I have time to make or buy. And the birthday boy or girl can spit all over it to their heart’s content.

Disposable hand towels

Every year, when my kids were little, the dreaded stomach bug would rip through our household at some point. We thought it was just one of those inevitable things that came with having small children. I figured that no matter what I tried to do at home, the kids would all be licking each other and sharing food at school, so why bother?

Eventually though, after spending a day or two every winter clutching a barf bag (and another few days taking care of and cleaning up after other sick people), I realized that I should at least try to have some control over what happened. So every fall, when the weather started getting cold, I took several steps to keep all sorts of illnesses out of our house. I made sure that we all got flu shots, I didn’t touch my face, and I had a daily ritual of wiping down all of the door handles, drawer pulls, and light switches on our bottom floor, where we all congregate the most (this is what I use).

And the instances of winter sickness in our household went way down! Even though the kids are older now, I still do this every winter (I was already doing it when COVID-19 hit NYC, so I didn’t need to scramble for disinfecting products).

There was one thing, however, that I kept saying I was going to do, but never followed through on, until the pandemic hit: I always wanted to stop using regular hand towels, at least in winter.

The bathroom that is used the most in our house is the one off of the dining room. Not only is my family in and out of it all day, but if anyone else is here, either socially or doing some kind of work, chances are that’s the one they’ll be using too.

I would try to change the hand towel every day, but it was still the weakest link in my attempts to keep my hands clean, because it depended on how well other people were washing their hands. I can wash my hands perfectly, but if I’m drying them on other people’s germs, what’s the point? And for people not in our household, I thought it was rude to offer them a towel that had been used before.

I always wanted to get disposable hand towels for that bathroom for the germiest time of year, and my husband kept convincing me that it was a waste of paper. But the beginning of the pandemic changed my mind.

I started with these little boxes of Kleenex hand towels, because they were the only ones I could find at the time. The towels themselves are great, but the box is designed to be put upside-down on a straight towel rack, something we don’t have in our downstairs bathroom (we have a ring towel holder). If you’re not using it that way, the box is too light to stay on the counter as you’re pulling out a towel—you have to hold the box down with your other (still wet) hand. So as soon as I could find them in stock, I switched to these, which come in a bigger, heavier box. They were better, but as the box empties out, it also gets too light.

Eventually, I switched to this countertop dispenser from Tork, (it comes in white, black, or stainless steel), and these refills, and I’m very happy with them. The towels aren’t quite as soft as the Kleenex ones, but they’re absolutely fine for wiping hands dry. The dispenser is really easy to refill, and lets you know when towels are running low. Most importantly, it stays put as you pull a towel out, even when it’s almost empty!

Much like the candles, I no longer think it likely that COVID-19 will spread via a hand towel, but plenty of other diseases could. Plus, again, there’s just an ick factor. So we’ll be going back to using regular cloth towels when it’s not cold and flu season, but when the weather gets cold, the dispenser will be coming back out.

Touchless greetings

In January of 2020, I got sicker than I’ve ever gotten in my life. I was at a convention in Las Vegas with 170 thousand other attendees, in from all over the world.

Had I gotten the Novel Coronavirus, which was just barely making it into the news at that point? I’ll never know. (Even if that’s what it was, I was almost completely isolated in my hotel room for three days after getting sick, with very limited contact for another two days before flying home, so chances are slim that I got anybody else sick after I started to have symptoms.) But when I think back to how many hands I had shaken in those five days, how many lines I had waited in with other people just inches from me, and how many products I had touched that had been touched thousands of times before, I have to wonder if I should be doing things differently.

There’s not much I can do about crowds, but I can control what I touch. I’ve always hated shaking hands, but like blowing out candles, it’s just customary, and I didn’t feel like I could demur without being seen as rude or anti-social. But after what we’ve all been through, I no longer care.

I have a feeling that I’ll be saying “Sorry, I don’t shake hands” a lot in the future, which will be annoying. We need some kind of substitute, something that says both “I don’t want to touch you” and “Here’s an intuitive replacement.” I don’t know what that is yet, but if you have any ideas, send them my way!

Face masks for flu protection

I hate wearing masks when the weather is nice. It feels stuffy. My breath is hot. I worry about getting a weird tan line on my face, even with sunscreen on. And don’t even get me started about exercising with a mask on. I would pull it down as much as I could, only pulling it up as I approached other people (and I tried to stick to wide sidewalks, so that I could just give them plenty of space and leave my mask down). I’m so grateful that the CDC updated it’s outdoor mask guidelines just as the weather was getting warmer where I live.

But in the cold weather, that was a different story! I absolutely loved how cozy the masks felt on my face. They made so much more sense than a scarf, because scarves aren’t designed to be washed each time you wear them.

When cold and flu season rolls around again, I will be wearing a mask in many situations, like on the subway, in stores, and in crowds. Every winter I see some Asian people in NYC wearing masks in public, and I always wondered to myself, what do they know that I don’t?

Turns out they knew everything. Asian countries got hit by SARS and MERS in a way the US never had to experience, and that probably helped them to fight COVID-19 more effectively. So I’m going to take a page from their book, and protect myself from others’ germs.

And what about when it’s not cold and flu season? If I’m sick, and I have to go out in public anyway, I will be wearing a mask, no matter what the weather is. It’s just the right thing to do, to not get other people sick.

Besides, I’ve got so many cute masks now, I might as well keep using them!