Considering that in LA there is a big variety of stores (we have eighteen) that will deliver a huge range of groceries in under two hours to your home for a very minimal fee I am completely mystified as to why nearly everyone I know is still going shopping themselves. Grocery stores are probably the highest risk place you can go for Covid infection this side of a hospital. There is no need whatsoever to go to one. There is no need to go to a pharmacy where people with hay fever and colds go to buy over the counter medications and cough and sneeze. You don’t need to get stuck in a line for take out. You have options. Fyl and I haven’t been in a store or a restaurant or a business of any kind almost since the shutdown. Yet our fridge, freezer, cupboards, bar and medicine cabinet are stuffed with everything you put in fridges, freezers, cupboards, bars and medicine cabinets. We have restaurant leftovers up the wazoo. We have all the stuff that other people are going to grocery stores, pharmacies, liquor barns, and restaurants for. And those people are several hundred times more likely to get infected than are we up here atop our hill in isolation.

Because every single time an even asymptotic infected person exhales, even just a simple silent breath, viruses tumble out and float about in the air for several seconds. If you breathe in air where they breathed out air just seconds before you have a very strong chance of inhaling a Covid virus, even just a single tiny one, that they just shed. Because the six foot radius we’re supposed to be keeping is a dynamic radius, so that everywhere an infected person just moved from leaves a danger zone. It’s not the infected person himself that is dangerous as much as it is the air in which he just exhaled. That is where the virus exists in the largest numbers, in the exhaled air we leave around us, so there will be a trail of air following the infected person that will be full of living viruses for at least several seconds.

Next time you’re in your favorite grocery store, whether it’s a big giant chain store or a smaller, hipper one, look at all the people and imagine the infected air an infected fellow shopper would leave in their wake. Who knows how many Covid viruses are expelled with that person’s every exhalation. And who know who among your fellow shoppers is asymptomatically infected and shedding viruses like there’s no tomorrow, which there might not be for the poor high risk bastard who breathes in one. Because you only need to inhale one of those exhaled viruses. If it fixes itself to a cell in your lungs with its spikey little protuberances, it will puncture the cell wall and begin feeding off your cell’s innards like some ultra microscopic lamprey to get the nutrients it needs to generate copies of itself. It reproduces like the viruses that inhabit an infected computer. The principal is virtually identical and if you’re not protected by the right antibodies, it will do to your internal organs what a computer virus does to your hard drive. All that from the one single virus you breathed in at MegaMart or Hipster Haven, even though you were six feet away from everyone else in the store.

Of course this doesn’t only apply to shoppers at your favorite grocery store. It could be the completely healthy looking couple in front of you on the sidewalk. It could be one of the people in line in front of you at the Thai take-out. It could be one of your very best friends in front of you, smiling.

Stay home.