Who were those non-masked people?*

My wife went car-looking yesterday. I went with her. We both carried our de rigueur masks to don when at the car dealership.

My wife had done her usual homework, searching the internet for the style car she wanted. She bought her present car – a 2010 Ford Flex – nine years ago in Arkansas. The Flex now has a bit more than 218,000 miles. When she was working, my wife put a lot of miles on her cars. In Texas, working for Girl Scouts and when running a local YWCA, she put more than 280,000 miles on her 1995 Ford Taurus. She put more miles on the Taurus as CEO of a Girl Scout council in Arkansas, and then traded the Taurus for a 2005 Mercury Montego. That car then became a trade-in on the Flex. She bought good cars, kept up with required maintenance and added up several hundred thousand miles in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

She and I arrived at the Ford dealership in Sarasota around 3:15 p.m. My wife parked the car and we put on our masks and got out. As we neared the front door of the dealership, I noticed that of the 15 or so people inside and the five outside, none wore a mask.

“They’re not wearing masks,” I said.

“Good,” my wife said, quickly removing her mask. “That means we don’t have to.”

During the several hours in the dealership, we saw 30 or more people. Four adults and two children wore masks.

My wife asked the salesman if anyone at the dealership had contracted he coronavirus. The salesman said several in the service department had become sick in early February. He said none was tested, so no one knew what they had.

“We assumed it was the coronavirus,” he said.

My wife said, “But it could have been the flu.”

The salesman agreed that was so.

At one point, when the salesman was checking on something, my wife said to me, “These people were in contact with all kinds of people, every day, with everybody touching the same surfaces.”

I said, “That’s right. And I haven’t seen anybody with rags and spray bottles cleaning anything.”

My wife said, “It could be they do the cleaning at night.”

When the salesman returned, my wife said, “You said several people got sick in the service department. Did anybody in sales or in the office get sick?”

The salesman shook his head. “Not a one,” he said.

So. Dozens of people a day in a close environment; 99.8 percent not wearing a mask (based on our observation); “a few” workers not in close contact with customers became ill, but no one knows if the illness was coronavirus or flu season normal flu. They all got well and came back to work.

Kind of makes you wonder about "the science" of bunker down, doesn't it. 

·   **    From “The Lone Ranger” radio and TV show. At the end of the show, someone in the town where the Lone Ranger and Tonto had again saved the day, would ask, “Who was that masked man?