Up until very recently, I have not been able to get any face masks and hence have not entered any public place such as a store. Last week, my daughter mailed me a few and so I was able to go to the local Asian grocery store and buy stuff that was running low. Some stores no longer allow you in without a face covering. Since I had a limited supply, I had wondered about the advisability of reusing face masks that were supposed to be disposable. While the recommendation is that one should not reuse them, it seemed wasteful since it would consume items that should be saved for people like health care workers who need them on a daily basis and need to shed them frequently
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These days some of us are spending more time videochatting with friends and family using one of the many platforms that are available. While they come closer to a semblance of physical contact than a phone call, they are still deficient in one area as Christina Cauterucci, who has been growing increasingly disenchanted with video gatherings, explains.

My internal alien has identified the lack of normal eye contact as one central pitfall of the video-chat experience. Talk to someone over FaceTime or Zoom, and they’ll never quite meet your eyes. They’ll spend the call looking at their screen, a few inches below or to the side of their camera, giving you the perpetual feeling of trying to get the attention of someone who’s ever so slightly preoccupied. Once, on a Skype call many years ago, a friend looked directly into her camera to say something heartfelt to me with the approximation of true eye contact. The effect was jarring: I didn’t fully realize that we hadn’t been making eye contact until she was suddenly staring straight into my soul from inside my screen. She was gazing at her computer’s eye, not mine, and could actually see less of my face than when she was looking at her screen, yet I felt strangely, uncomfortably exposed. When I recently tried it on a video call with my niece and nephew in an attempt to make them laugh, it gave me the unsettling impression of carrying on a conversation with HAL 9000, who’d been watching me watch the kids throughout our call. (FaceTime, perhaps even more eerily, has a new feature that attempts “eye contact correction” to make it appear you’re looking directly at each other, even when you’re not.)

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We have been told the importance of washing our hands to prevent the spread of viruses. But how easily do viruses spread? An experiment done by the Japanese public broadcast TV station NHK looked at what happens in public places where people congregate, such as at a restaurant buffet. They put some invisible fluorescent paint on the hand of one person and after 30 minutes used black light to find out where it had ended up.
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