How many signs in public and private spaces can you find providing guidance regarding COVID-19?
Beginning in 2020, COVID signage and equipment were everywhere. Stickers indicated how to stand six feet apart. Arrows on the grocery-store floor directed shopping-cart traffic. Plastic barriers enforced distancing. Masks required signs dotted store windows, before they were eventually replaced by softer pronouncements such as masks recommended and masks welcome. Such messages—some more helpful than others—became an unavoidable part of navigating pandemic life.
Four years later, the coronavirus has not disappeared—but the health measures are gone, and so is most daily concern about the pandemic. Yet much of this COVID signage remains, impossible to miss even if the messages are ignored or outdated. In New York, where I live, notices linger in the doorways of apartment buildings and stores. A colleague in Woburn, Massachusetts, sent me a photo of a sign reminding park-goers to gather in groups of 10 or less; another, in Washington, D.C., showed me stickers on the floors of a bookstore and pier bearing faded reminders to stay six feet apart. “These are artifacts from another moment that none of us want to return to,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU and the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, told me. All these fliers, signs, and stickers make up the “ghost architecture” of the pandemic, and they are still haunting America today…
The contradiction inherent in ghost architecture is that it both calls to mind the pandemic and reflects a widespread indifference to it. Maybe people don’t bother to take the signs down because they assume that nobody will follow them anyway, Fessler said. Avoidance and apathy are keeping them in place, and there’s not much reason to think that will change. At this rate, COVID’s ghost signage may follow the same trajectory as the defunct Cold War–era nuclear-fallout-shelter signs that lingered on New York City buildings for more than half a century, at once misleading observers and reminding them that the nuclear threat, though diminished, is still present.
I have noticed these leftover signs as well. I recently spotted a retail shop with a sign saying that people without masks were not allowed inside.
There are numerous ways to pass along a message in a large complex society and signs are one way to do so. But, this assumes people will read the signs and then act on them. I have read a little about road signs and how too many signs can make for clutter and less attentive drivers. Is the same true for public health warnings in every public space? How well did people follow these directives? How many people follow the hand washing signs when they are posted in many restrooms (with specific warnings for employees)?
Another way to address this would be to redesign spaces so that there are fewer opportunities to be within such proximity to others or to limit the possible problems of proximity. However, many of our public and private spaces are pretty open. A bank lobby has lots of open space. Grocery stores have rows but these do not go up to the ceiling and checkout areas are right next to each other. Entertainment spaces, like movie theaters and stadiums, put people in proximity to others. And so on. It would be very difficult to address all of these and try to retain some sense of public interaction and space.