You will get pretty close to the same pleasantry by talking to her on facetime/skype. We had a whole family gathering on facetime last night including my self isolated 83 y old mother in law. You should try it.
25’ is probably safe. I just don’t get why you want someone to promise you what’s safe. Why won’t you accept that the experts aren’t perfectly sure?
No offense, but it seems like you’re looking for perfect answers, or specifications.
There are no specifications for this. There’s no such thing as absolutely no risk. What you want to do is to approach this with risk reduction in mind. The fewer times you or other people in your household leave your house, the lower the risk. The more frequently you wash your hands, the more precautions you take, the safer you are. The more you violate these ‘rules,’ the greater the risk. You’re going to have to live with this, and probably for longer than 8 weeks.
Where has Manda JO (or anyone else) ever said they were looking for promises?
We all have to make decisions, and we want those decisions to be as informed as possible. (And no more so.)
The problem is not only can we not tell you how risky it is to stand 25 feet from your mother, we can’t actually decide for you whether that risk is “safe” for you as an individual. Because your acceptable risk level is an individual policy decision. It isn’t an objective or uniform thing.
For instance, if we were able to calculate that you or your mother have a 5% probability of being infected on the day you wanted to check on her and that there is a 0.1% probability of one of you infecting the other if you stand 25 feet apart on that particular day given your (or your mother’s) viral load, the wind velocity, wind direction, and humidity, would you consider this “safe enough”? Because personally I would take the chance given these odds. But I wouldn’t judge someone harshly for not feeling the same way since maybe they are older than me and have more underlying medical issues than I do, so the stakes are greater for them.
But I probably would be wary of taking my chances once my probability of being infected was in the 10% ballpark. Or if my probability of getting infected at a 25 ft distance increased to 1%. I am not using a complicated calculus to justify my wariness at these thresholds. It’s just the odds feel scarier to me for some reason. All of it is subjective.
In my line of work, I am always being asked if it’s safe to do X. Is it safe to eat the fish in a particular waterbody or is it safe to go swimming in it. It would be professionally inappropriate for me to tell people it’s not safe to do these things because everyone uses their own rubic to gauge “safe”. All I can tell you is that we’ve flagged a waterbody as being one of concern and what the health department recommends you should do to mitigate your risk. But I’m not going to be able to give the information you need to do your own risk assessment. Not only do I not have it, but even if I did have it, it would only be information meaningful for a tiny snapshot in time. A tiny snapshot from the past that may not be relevant today. It won’t tell you about your risk right now. So you’d be better off just following the health’s department recommendations as much as you can. And if you have to deviate from the recommendations, do what you can to mitigate your risk.
Like, maybe in your case you can wear a scarf or something on your face and ask your mother to do the same. Maybe you can take a portable fan with you and position it so that it is perpendicular to your face, so that droplets and aerosols coming out of you are dispersed into the air. Maybe you can spray the air in front of you with a water bottle as you’re speaking so that aerosols get weighed down by humidity and don’t blow around so much. These may be crazy suggestions and I have no idea if they would do anything. But there are likely things you can do to lower your risk when engaging in a somewhat risky activity. (Like, I tell people if they gotta eat locally caught fish, at least take the skin off. Doing that one thing can make a huge difference.)
Stay upwind, you’ll be fine.
Exactly how many times has she asked “I just want to know if 25’ is safe”? She is looking for a promise that no one is prepared to give. I have a feeling if someone told her “no, it’s not safe” she’s got “ok, how about 30 feet?” all loaded up.
According to the article, nobody coughed, sneezed, or looked sick. It’s worth pointing out that studies seem to show that, contrary to other viruses, the viral load seems rather high when people first contract it, which means that when they are going to shed virus when they are asymptomatic. They might have literally been spreading and shedding within that short span of time.
The article suggests that this virus spread through aerosols, but I’m not really sure why they would reach that conclusion. A chorus is the perfect type of gathering for this virus - no aerosols required. Choir singers would be producing a higher number of air droplets even without coughing or sneezing. Their mouths would be open, and they would be exhaling a greater than usual volume of droplets. By singing, they would be projecting those droplets further than if they had been simply talking. I’m also guessing that their idea of “distance” was fatally inaccurate. By virtue of the fact they were singing, 3-6 feet might not have been enough distance.
Or cut the odds, and have both you and your conversation partner BOTH stand upwind of each other.
I screwed up my data plotting. I calculated the percent of cases by total cases, not increase by day. If you look at the percent increase by day, the numbers are even better and they have been below 10% for 5 of the last 7 days.
You can click on the graphs at your link to show different daily numbers. Deaths and cases are doubling every 3-4 days. Mar 25th 65k cases/1027 deaths vs March 29th 143k cases/2583 deaths.
No. I want to be able to discuss relative risk without there being a chorus of “if it’s risky, just don’t do it”. We are ALL doing things that increase our risk. We are all having to negotiate this crazy new world. It does no good at all to treat all risks as absolute, and refuse to discuss the possibility of gray.
You yourself said you went to the grocery store 5 days ago. Were you literally out of calories before you went, or could you have put it off another couple of days, if you’d eaten the dregs of your freezer and pantry? One of the decisions we all have to make is how often do we risk going to the store. It’s not useful to just say “no one has any fucking clue, so decide for yourself”. It’s much more useful to talk about potential avenues of infection in a grocery store, talk about ways to minimize them, talk about tradeoffs rather than just “if you have to ask, find another way.”
I have learned a lot of stuff in this thread. Good, useful stuff that helps inform my judgment. But I’ve learned it despite the chorus of “everything is risky, so don’t do anything unless it’s life or death (except go to the grocery store and get take out and walk outside, that’s ok).”
Wait til Trump calls a police state in America and suspends elections. You will change your mind pretty quick
Is there a police state in the USA that he can call?
I always get voicemail :mad:
Be patient. Lots of people are calling for a police state these days.
You, of all people, Manda JO, I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe how breezily you dismiss people as “the chorus”. People are saying the same thing because they/we have been listening to informed governors, public health officials, epidemiologists, and local officials. There aren’t any probabilities of risk here that you can calculate. Ten feet or twenty-five feet? We don’t know, so err on the safe side and just don’t do it. You’re asking an unanswerable philosophical/ethical/moral question that many people here have answered the only possible way. Is it worth risking the lives of your mother, you, and probably people you don’t know for some kind of principle? NO.
I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to shelter-in-place since March 8th. So have a lot of others around here and the Seattle area is reporting a slowing. The people that aren’t doing their part really, really piss me off. I can’t tell you how heart-breaking it is that you’re one of them.
I’m not risking anything. I’ve left the house 3 times since the 11th, and never gone anywhere but takeout, the grocery store or the doctor. I shower before and after I leave the house. But clearly not everyone is erring utterly on the side of caution. When people ask if they can go to the grocery store, no one is saying “NO NO NO we can’t calculate the risk. Don’t leave until there’s NOTHING left to eat in your house. Try to eat as little as possible: like, enough to survive, but be a little hungry all the time. If you do that, you can really stretch the time between those grocery store trips.” Why is no one saying that? How is a trip to the grocery store not at least as risky as some of the other things people have been called fools for even asking about?
Look, this has been a really good thread. I’ve learned a lot. But it should be okay to ask HOW and WHY transmission happens, to try to help each other understand relative risk. I know we don’t know. But why is it taboo to speculate? To brainstorm?
Thinking about extremes has actually gotten me wondering: what are New York City dog owners doing right now? Is giving up their dogs the most moral choice to make?
The Swedish approach of doing little worried some people. It is unclear how worried they should be.
Nm