Today was the first day they opened up the shopping malls.
Most of the stores in the mall were open even though the mall itself was not crowded. Many of the stores had signs saying how many people could be admitted at a time, and that masks are required. Many of them had a large hand sanitiser station just inside the doorway. At the garage entrance to the mall, the attendant (every mall or venue with a parking garage has a personal guard/attendant who checks every single vehicle that enters, often looking inside the car and sometime asking you to open the trunk as well) was checking the temperature of every single occupant in your vehicle before allowing you to enter the garage.
[As an aside, as a doctor who knows that there is a gradient of normal body temperatures depending on how you measure it (for example, axillary temp is usually the coolest, followed by sublingual temp, followed by rectal temp which is the warmest), it is interesting to me that they are using thermal guns to scan random exterior body parts – forehead, arm, neck, whatever they can reach. Not that it really matters I guess, but I just wonder whether any of that has been validated. I would expect all those surfaces to be cooler than internal body temp, and therefore to not actually read high until the internal body temp was quite high.]
You can see from the billboard advertising just how long they were closed – it still says “פורים שמח – Happy Purim.” Purim was about eight weeks ago. The supermarket in the mall, which has been open all along, was more updated:
There, the signs already say חג שבועות שמח – Happy Shavuot.
It was nice to see things staring to open up again. Hopefully the case rate here will stay low, otherwise everything will have to shut down again – I just couldn’t imagine that, but who knows? For what its worth, I thought this shirt they were selling in the newly opened Fox store summed things up pretty well:
