Clean Pens, Dirty Pens

My father fell. He is recovering in a rehabilitation unit at a hospital here in Los Angeles, and I went to see him. At the entrance there is a sign-in sheet and a jar of pens, and the jar was empty. The nurse pointed to a second jar on the far side of the desk. I was confused until I read the stickers. One jar said “clean pens.” The other said “dirty pens.” I had not seen this in years. I raised an eyebrow, and she said, “Yes, this is still going on.”

The rest of the scene matched. Every staff member wore a mask — in the rooms, in the corridors, at the desk, outside on the sidewalk. Not fresh masks going in and out of rooms. The same mask, all shift. Visitors wore them too, none anywhere near a patient with anything. And standing on the nursing station counter, a sheet of plexiglass about twenty-four inches high, installed six years ago as a temporary measure and still there, long after anyone could say what it is for. This is a rehabilitation unit. Nobody is having surgery.

Start with the pens, because they are the simplest. There is no guideline, no standard, no published protocol anywhere in infection control for sorting ballpoint pens into a clean jar and a dirty jar. It is not a practice that fell out of favor; it never existed. The CDC’s own science brief put the risk of catching the virus from a contaminated surface at less than one in ten thousand per contact. The jars are not infection control. They are a sorting ritual, and the nurse who pointed me to the clean one knew it.