Shoppers Are Now Required To Wear A Mask In D.C. Grocery Stores by rsadon

Shoppers Are Now Required To Wear A Mask In D.C. Grocery Stores –

At the Safeway in Petworth on Wednesday afternoon, a worker stood at the entrance with a tally counter, the kind you more commonly see in the hands of bouncers at crowded clubs. When the count hit 70 customers, the store’s policy became “one in, one out.”

Other employees milled around, instructing shoppers to abide by new “one-way” signs directing people down the aisles. Most patrons wore some sort of face covering, as did most of the workers.

Around the region, grocery stores are putting new restrictions on food shopping–instituting one-way aisles, cutting capacity, and installing plastic shields– to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, while local governments are beginning to order some of those changes by law.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday issued a new order mandating that shoppers cover their faces with a scarf or wear a mask while shopping. It also limits how many people can be in the store at one time to allow social distancing, requires hand sanitizers or wipes to be available at the entrance, and encourages stores to use one-way aisles.

“We want folks to wear coverings,” Bowser said at her daily press briefing. “A homemade covering, a scarf or other mask would be appropriate. I see a lot of people are already doing that. We want people to continue doing that to keep our workers safe.”

The order also includes new rules for grocers — they have to check employees for symptoms and install plastic shields in checkout lines by April 20 and immediately end self-service food stations like hot buffets and salad bars. Workers who interact with the public must be provided with masks and gloves if possible. The mayor’s directive also reclassifies farmers markets as non-essential, and they now need to present a plan to city officials for how they would manage social distancing to receive a waiver to stay open.

Grocery workers across the country, and locally, have started to die from COVID-19. A Giant employee in Largo, Md. passed away last week after being diagnosed with the disease. The Trader Joe’s on 14th Street closed this week after a worker tested positive for coronavirus, while an employee at the Columbia Heights Giant tested positive last week.

Many grocery stores have already started voluntarily changing their practices to help mitigate the spread.

Safeway has limited hours from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in some stores and installed plastic shields in checkout lines. Giant, Safeway, and Harris Teeter said this week they will start limiting the number of people in stores and implementing one-way aisles.

“These are all really important public health interventions that I do think will help to flatten the curve of COVID-19,” says William Borden, the chief quality and population health officer with GW Medical Faculty Associates. He adds that while facial coverings won’t stop all coronavirus particles, they can help limit the spread.

“COVID-19 can spread by droplets, which might land on a surface like a doorknob or on our hands which we can pass to someone else, but they’re also small droplets that float in the air around us,” Borden says. “Encouraging people to wear a mask or other mouth or nose covering will limit those droplets that could spread COVID-19.”

But UFCW Local 400, the union representing Giant and Safeway workers around the area, says Bowser’s order falls short of the necessary protections for grocery store staff. The union is pushing for even stricter social distancing guidelines and to designate grocery store employees as first responders to ensure priority testing.

“What we don’t want are people showing up to work and thinking they’re healthy and not contagious, and are in fact spreading the disease to every customer they interact with,” says UFCW Local 400 communications director Jonathan Williams. “We don’t want grocery stores to become a vector for this disease, and the way that we get a hold on this situation is to provide testing to every grocery worker immediately, and unfortunately the mayor’s order falls short of doing that.”

The union is calling for an order that limits stores to 10 customers per every 10,000 square feet, more distance than any store has currently implemented, Williams said. He’d also like additional police and security personnel to enforce social distancing.

“We don’t need the grocery store to become the most dangerous place you can go,” Williams says. “It is impossible to follow social distancing protocols in grocery stores without setting strict limits on the number of customers in stores.”

Back at the Petworth Safeway, shoppers lined up six feet apart to check out, while the beeps of the registers were mixed with the chorus of shoppers’ goodbyes. As they walked out, many told the workers to “stay safe.”

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