Two Masks Is the New Mask

What retailers need to know about PPE, sanitation and COVID-19 in 2021.

- Gina Acosta

If 2020 was the year of masking and sanitation, then 2021 is promising to be the year of double-masking and double-sanitation.

Despite large-scale optimism that the availability of vaccines will end or at least greatly curtail the pandemic, many retailers and suppliers say that the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitation protocols hasn’t diminished, and is, in fact, more critical now than in 2020.

“With the newly discovered ‘variant’ strains of COVID-19, as well as the expanding ‘COVID-19 fatigue,’ it is more important than ever to continually reinforce the policies and procedures that have been established for operating under COVID-19 protocols,” asserts Michael Stigers, CEO of Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Cub Foods. “All of the learned protocols and practices will be in place for the foreseeable future. This is a multiyear, if not a multigenerational, experience.”

Stigers may be right about that “multigenerational experience.”

While the United States has been vaccinating nearly 1 million people a day, new, more contagious strains of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 have led to more global surges in cases. In late January, one of the vaccine makers, Moderna, said that it was “not sure” whether its vaccine would be able to fight off all of the new strains, and revealed that it would test an additional booster dose of its vaccine (which would now require three shots instead of two) to strengthen the immune response against emerging strains, especially the South African variant.