The Upside of COVID Hygiene Theater

We are now more than a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic, and we are once again hand-wringing about “hygiene theater,” the various public displays of sanitation and cleanliness that critics attack as unnecessary, wasteful, and even counterproductive. But if detractors mock these measures—temperature checks before concerts, QR codes instead of paper menus at restaurants, outdoor mask wearing—for being useless and performative, it’s worth remembering that not everything we do need necessarily have a use, and that not everything performative is without merit.

This is at least the third wave of the “hygiene theater” debate, each prior flare-up having tracked a wave of the virus itself. The term was coined by ’s own Derek Thompson . Thompson was riffing on —the intrusive and cumbersome airport security protocols adopted in the aftermath of September 11 that, experts suggest, are largely ineffective and serve mainly as the visible illusion of security. Five months ago, just before the Delta variant surged in the United States, a flurry of articles lamented the of hygiene theater and the it offers. More recently, an article in that hygiene theater might lead to a perpetual landscape where “health bureaucrats will frighten Americans with new variants to get us to continue to accept their ‘inconveniences’ based on false claims of the safety they provide—much as the TSA has done with terrorism over the last 20 years.”