The Covid-19 pandemic was such a strange time. Everyone was required to wear masks on planes. Hotels paid Clorox, Lysol and other companies for branding how clean they were. Everyone claimed that cutbacks to food service and housekeeping was about safety protocols.
I was grateful to live in the suburbs of a very blue city in a red state, giving me the option to stay as far away from people as I wanted to without being required to.
The time we spent at home in April 2020 (‘two weeks to stop the spread’) really warped a sense of time. I thought it was probably a good idea to wear high quality masks indoors in crowded space, but never understood people who wore low quality masks alone in their car or outdoors running.
I’m glad we’re past all of that. Some people didn’t think handshakes would ever return, but thankfully elbow bumps didn’t become a thing.
If you’re somehow waxing nostalgic for those times there’s one hotel you can visit. The Simpson Hotel in Duncan, Arizona is a throwback… to 2021. This hotel requires guests to be current on Covid-19 vaccinations.
Covid in 2024-5: In loving memory of the five dear ones we lost to Covid-19, we ask that our guests be current on vaccinations. We are willing to make exceptions here and there as long as a guest is healthy and respects our wish not have the virus in our airspace. We follow the science around Covid and we hope that you do too if you plan to stay with us.
This isn’t just an old note, like the stickers you still see in some hotels saying that vaccinated guests don’t have to mask or occupancy limits on elevators, with markings on the ground showing where you should stand distanced from other guests. This is marked as “2024-5.”
They say they “follow the science around Covid” but that doesn’t seem quite right.
In early 2021 the vaccines were generally sterilizing. And maybe nasal boosters would restore that. But their effectiveness has waned substantially and they don’t stop infection and transmission even if they’re protective. This seems more like mood affiliation than science.
I’m ok with the mood affiliation, it’s meaningful to the hotel owners (“in loving memory of..”) but we should call it that.
I was a strong proponent of vaccines, certainly for adults. They aren’t as effective as they once were. We don’t really update them like we could, and effectiveness has waned to the level of protection I wrote over four years ago that I expected them to have in the first place. Just how good they were in the first half of 2021 was a surprise, and underappreciated.
The hotel says they’ll make an exception for ‘healthy’ people. Are they following the science on that? A body mass index of 20-24? Cancer-free? Show your CDC vaccine card, or come take this MRI. The science included asymptomatic spread – a guest might be healthy but still carrying and spreading the virus. Like I said, this hotel brings us all back to a time when we did silly things and thought silly things. Some people miss the spring 2020 and into 2021, I guess.