"proliferation of office-reopening paraphernalia"while "more dangerous activities are still allowed"

[Demovictory9]

The Rise of the Creepy Reopening Industry
In the absence of a coherent government response to the pandemic, the private sector has stepped into the void with new disinfecting tools, surveillance apps, and cardboard.

--------------------------


Some are more or less common household or office items rebranded as tools in the fight against Covid-19. You can, for instance, now purchase a variety of “vital companions to protect against exposure and spread of Covid-19” from the company Go-SafeMate, which include a potholder-like piece of rubber that fits over doorknobs and a small set of tongs with which to pick up potentially contaminated objects. Another company currently advertises “corrugated partitions,” otherwise known as pieces of cardboard, as Covid-19 safety devices to be installed in offices. (“Corrugated board will assist with a safer return to the workplace or classroom as these partitions encourage social distancing and provide a physical, yet removable, barrier,” a press release for the product assures prospective buyers.) Employers can buy antimicrobial polymer wallpaper for offices, antimicrobial I.D. cards for use on cruises—which were early sites of the coronavirus outbreaks—and electronic wristbands for employees that vibrate whenever they come within six feet of others.

Then there are the companies selling Covid-era cleaning services, disinfecting tools, and technological solutions. The San Diego-based HYGIENICA announced that it had recently secured $1 million in seed round funding to support a new version of its proprietary sprayer, an “electro-atomizing” machine that’s worn like a backpack and used to blast away “99.99 percent of viruses, pathogens, and bacteria” on surfaces. A host of management apps intended to track workers’ health and even their movements has also sprung up in the vacuum of uncertainty. In June, for instance, the I.T. management firm SysAid released an app that promised to monitor workers’ locations and self-reported symptoms, including “alerting management to high-risk employees and automatically locking user accounts where needed.” Though billed as temporary safety measures, those types of monitoring apps have at least some potential to become permanent. As Jason Schultz, a professor of clinical law at New York University told The Wall Street Journal, “Employers don’t really have any incentives to remove surveillance once they install it.”

“The proliferation of office-reopening paraphernalia is just the natural extension of the kind of opportunism that first arose in the early days of the pandemic.”

In many ways, the proliferation of office-reopening paraphernalia is just the natural extension of the kind of opportunism that first arose in the early days of the pandemic, when hucksters price-gouged hand sanitizer, peddled pseudoscientific wellness treatments, and pushed various at-home grooming, cooking, and exercise products. Not a few of the tools and services marketed to facilitate reopenings also fall under what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently called “hygiene theater,” or ostentatious displays of disinfecting and scrubbing that ultimately fail to provide protection against airborne transmission of the coronavirus. Such measures, Thompson argues, are “risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/158734/rise-creepy-reopening-industry