I’m probably a little on the lax side when it comes to those of us who aren’t raging maskholes.
My wife and I have stayed in almost entirely. We happily wear masks when we head out to do any shopping. We’ve not had any guests at home except a handful of contractors and we’re pretty strict with them being masked (only one was bad about it).
But, we’ve visited my parents 2-3 times and don’t wear masks in the house with them. We’ve gone out to dinner, outside seating only, 3-4 times. We’ve attended a couple small birthday parties with extended family, maybe about 15-20 people tops. I broke down and went to a fantasy draft party with about 8 guys in one persons backyard and we didn’t wear masks. When I walk outside I usually keep my mask off so long as I’m not in a congested area.
So that’s a long winded way of saying that I think it’s probably okay to be with small groups provided that the members of that group individually are being cautious on their own and you’re paying close attention to things like hand washing and prolonged close physical contact. Also, after an event you need to basically self-quarantine just to be safe. You are taking a risk, make no mistake about it, but some risk is manageable so long as you don’t act irresponsibly.
Indeed, we were ourselves invited to a family get-together with in-laws for July 4th. It was an outdoor event, and we strongly considered it until we found out that 18 (!) people had been invited for this small backyard cookout. We thereupon declined to attend.
Separately, I’ve been required to go back to my office and out to construction sites for work, but I wear a mask at all times and socially distance. My wife and son are both working at home.
One event I am personally considering is a weeklong ski trip to Maine in January. I would have one roommate, and we would drive up together (from Connecticut). (Normally we have 4-6 people in a condo on this ski trip.) The condo has a kitchen, and I do not plan to do any indoor dining in restaurants.
I have already decided to forgo any flyaway trips to ski resorts out west until the pandemic subsides, so this is in place of that.
You’ve gotten lots of good advice here, @ThelmaLou, so I won’t belabor the points except to say I agree with the cautious ones.
No one really knows how they will fare with this virus if they become infected, and we only get one attempt (hopefully only one!) to find out how it will go until there is a viable vaccine.
From all you have described about the lack of commitment to mask wearing, food, loud talking, small space with maybe only a hope of proper physical distancing, your gathering would be too risky for me, personally.
Heck, I’ve got an upcoming social engagement with very similar circumstances. A group of older, intelligent careful women, 5 of us, masks required, outdoors on a deck with food and alcohol. I really, really don’t want to go – and we’ve got fewer than 750 confirmed cases in my county. I am probably going to drop in, leave the bottle, blow a few air kisses from a safe distance and hightail it back home.
When you attend those birthday parties with 15-20 people, is everyone masked? How do you know the members of those groups are being being cautious on their own? Do you take their word for it? And what counts as cautious? If those people have attended other gatherings of 20 people who also claim to have been cautious, do you take all those people at their word?
It reminds me of the old truism about STD’s: When you have sex with someone, you’re also having sex with everyone they’ve ever slept with (and everyone each of those people have slept with). When you party with people, you’re also partying with all the people they’ve partied with. That’s a lot of blind trust to have in a whole lot of people.
I’m happy to hear you aren’t going to do this. The justifications in the OP are a bunch of nonsense, it doesn’t surprise me you saw right through them.
I can understand the frustration that drives people to think like that but I just can’t understand why people won’t wear masks and probably can’t contain myself when addressing it, so I’ll stop now and say once again I’m glad you’re staying safe/
Like I said. We know it’s a risk. These are close family members, people we trust to behave responsibly and who we’ve talked to regularly about their habits. Could they lie? Sure. Could they be out clubbing, I suppose. But it’s not bloody likely. These events were more than month ago and no reported issues, my wife has been tested several times due to some unrelated medical procedures and has remained clean.
To extend your analogy…theoretically my wife could be cheating on me and attending orgies with IV drug users, so I could catch an STD. But I’m not gonna abstain. There’s no such thing as perfect.
I think numbers matter more than households. If 15-20 people represent 7-10 households, that seems much more high risk. Every household has someone doing shopping. Surely some of those people are going to work everyday, out in the world. And COVID level in your community is also a big deal.
On the other hand, my sister came and stayed 6 weeks with my mom this summer. It was 8 people between the two households, but it was just 2 households. I felt very comfortable extending the bubble that far–but wouldn’t have dreamed of going to a gathering of 8 friends, from 8 different households, no matter how much I trusted each one.
Yes, I have been in several situations in which I’ve socially interacted w/ small groups. I can/will provide details if desired, but I realize that many of you will think me inexcusably irresponsible - and dangerous - for what I do. That’s fine. Since the beginning of this, I’ve consistently been of the opinion that each of us needs to determine for ourselves what we consider to be appropriate precautions, and that - absent extreme behavior - we ought to respect other peoples’ personal determinations.
In general terms - I always wear a mask in public interior places; I have only been in a group of <8 people once, back in May, outdoors, and was somewhat uncomfortable with that; the vast majority of such situations are outside and distanced; there is no physical contact; we believe the people we interact with to be quite limited in their interactions - i.e., no air travel, attendance of bars/rallies/large parties, etc.
Not asking anyone to praise/criticize me - just offering my personal views/experiences to allow a somewhat broader perspective.
To clarify, I’m not suggesting people lie or that people are deliberately endangering each other. I understand that the reason we trust people is because they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. But we humans have a tendency to forget or dismiss exceptions we’ve made, especially when we think those exceptions were small risks.
Here’s an example: a relative of mine went to an unmasked bridal shower a few weeks ago. She’d been cautious, except of course when she gathered with extended family on her husband’s side (everyone unmasked), because of course, she trusts them. She didn’t ask them all if they’d been masked when around others because that would be like asking them if they’d cheated on their spouses: rude and intrusive, and people would be affronted because she didn’t trust them. But surely they wouldn’t be a risk, right?
Now she’s at a bridal shower with about 13 other women, all people she knows and trusts. How many of them have an unmasked experience they discounted because they were with people they trusted, people who themselves had discounted experiences? My relative is not at high risk, but her elderly mother, who’s in her bubble, is.
No insults intended here, just frustration with a human tendency I wish, oh so unrealistically, we’d overcome.
Honestly, this lack of pragmatism adds fuel to the MAGA assholes’ fire. Responsible people taking measured risk is a necessity for life to function. When you attack allies over some absurd purity test you embody the “radical extremist views” the orange shithead likes to vomit all over TV.
I wouldn’t go out 3-4 days a week. I wouldn’t visit my elderly parents within 14 days of having been in a (very modest) social setting. I wouldn’t obnoxiously refuse to wear a mask in pretty much any situation where it was required or requested. I wouldn’t even gripe about mask wearing in an offhanded way since I think that’s giving permission to people to be unsafe. I’m on your side, but I illustrated 3 occasions over the span of 6 months where I interacted with someone other than my SO unmasked and you’re trying to educate me like I’m a child. It’s not a good look.
I respectfully disagree. Responsible people don’t take risks that can’t be measured, and a party with 15-20 people, no matter how good and kind they are, is still a substantial risk if attendees are not masked. It’s not pragmatism to insist otherwise. COVID doesn’t care if people who gather unmasked are good people or not. That’s real pragmatism for you.
Misrepresenting what I said doesn’t do anything to change my opinion that your doing more harm than good to the cause. Take your “respectful” straw man somewhere else.
I have said repeatedly that it’s a risk I have chosen to take on rare occasions. In no way have I made an argument that it’s NOT risky and I am not encouraging anything. I have also taken steps to ensure that ONLY I carry the risk by self-quarantining.
If you think I’m your enemy, then perhaps you’re just virtue signaling here.
I seem to have hit a nerve. Since you’ve misrepresented what I’ve said and taken such offense, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to try to explain any longer. I sincerely wish you, your family, and your friends good health. Bye now.
We had a planned camping trip with two other families; all three families are intensely paranoid about this. All three of us would be on separate but adjacent sites, and the rule was everybody would wear masks, even around the fire, as long as we were together. This in a state where the positive rate has fallen to consistently between 1% to 2%.
Come to pass, one family didn’t show up because the dad suddenly had a fever, and it turns out that someone in his office was infected, and he somehow got it (his office, for background, consists of a warehouse and front office, in which everyone in the office wears masks, but the people in the warehouse take them off as they work even though they are not supposed to).
Well, that was a long story. My whole point is, you just can’t be careful enough.
The hardest thing about (American) society ramping down from the COVID-19 pandemic is going to be that the “risk that can’t be measured” will never go away. Eventually – who knows how long? – COVID-19 will be a “background radiation” endemic illness like mononucleosis, norovirus, meningitis, influenza, etc. Eventually, people will not feel the need to modify their activities to deal with a COVID-19 “risk that can’t be measured”.
The trick is how and when do we – each of us, in our individual headspace – get there from here? There will be no bright line --not even an early-adopted vaccine IMHO. At some point, every one of us will be taking that unmeasureable risk. We will not be able to achieve certainty of outcome – certainly not now, not tomorrow, and perhaps never.
I have to wonder who’s really to blame that we are all so scared (well, some of us) of human interaction these days. It’s really sad.
If this thing was really as contagious as all that, almost everybody except complete shut-ins would have it by now.
If it’s like the common cold, and in many ways it is a lot like some varieties of common cold, there may never be a vaccine. How long can you go on like this?
It’s already background radiation to me and humans are spectacularly bad at measuring actual risk anyway. Like, I was called out because I rarely wear a seat belt if I’m alone in a car (but always, if there’s someone else in the car). Like, in the infinitesimally small chance that I get in an accident.
However, I am just about as frequently a pedestrian, and sometimes a bicyclist. Pedestrians and bicyclists where I live are way, way more likely to be hurt by a car than a person who is inside a car, with or without a setabelt, and as a pedestrian there’s not much you can do about it. Stay off certain streets, avoid certain intersections? Good luck with that if you have to go far out of your way to avoid them on your way to the bus stop. It’s life. You have to accept some risk. Whether you can measure it or not.
If the word “measurable” confuses things, I’ll gladly rephrase it:
Responsible people don’t do things that evidence has shown and experts have determined to endanger others.
Simply because the risk of a gathering can’t be measured doesn’t mean all unmeasurable risks are equal. You can’t precisely measure the risk to ourselves or others of a 10-minute masked, social distanced trip to the grocery store, but we know it’s small (evidence and experts). We can’t precisely measure the risk of attending an unmasked, not-social-distanced gathering of 15 or 20 (or 50 or 100) people, but we know it’s significant (evidence and experts again). If this risk were only to those attending, we could say they could decide to take the plunge and determine in their own heads if the risk is worth it, but it isn’t, and they don’t.
Everything you wrote I agree with. Now then, regarding the bolded: How will we ever know when the described risk is no longer significant. “Significant” is not a bright line everyone can readily see all at the same time. There will be “early adopters” and there will be people who never leave their house again from this day forward.
Personally, I would not attend a social gathering under the circumstances you described.
That said, I have begun to resume socializing with people outside my family. And because the socializing I’m doing involves playing board games, maintaining a six foot distance is impractical.
However, we all wear masks and gloves. I bring extras for anyone who hasn’t brought their own. If somebody refused to wear them, I would choose to leave. But so far, nobody has had a problem with this.
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