I’m living in Canada and my work is thinking of sending a group of us to Florida so that we can do a few days of face-to-face with other team members scattered across N. America.
Here’s the thing - my wife is immunocompromised from a kick-ass cancer battle she had several years ago. We are both in our early 60s. I can probably say that I’m quite healthy but I can also say that I don’t think that my presence would be critical to this effort.
I am genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not you would have any reservations about going on a business trip under these circumstance. Thanks
If you want to go, you might do what my brother did when he came to spend time with our mom, when she was dying of covid. After he was ready to leave, and before he went home, he quarantined himself, away from his partner, for ten days. After ten days with no symptoms and a negative rapid test, he went home to his immunocompromised partner.
Fwiw, I’m in my early sixties, have a normal immune system, and I’m about to go to a big square dance event. It will be masked, but I’ll need to travel on airplanes and eat with other people.
I got a fresh dose of vaccine, and I’m not too worried. But there are no people in my home at higher risk than mine.
Masks are no longer required on airplanes and here in “the free state of Florida” we still have a number of active hotspots. I’d be very cautious indeed for your wife’s sake, and puzzegal’s suggestion of a post-trip self-quarantine is a very good.
The WaPo tracker shows Florida cases increasing by 31% over the last seven days. Hospitalizations up 20% and deaths up 11%. It’s clearly the start of a wave. But how big it will be and how much risk it poses to a visitor will be guesswork. I wouldn’t expect the average Floridian to be doing much to lower your risk though …
Even worse, FL only publicizes data every two weeks so we don’t have a clue where they are in a surge. For example, it’s safe to assume that Miami-Dade county has at least double the daily cases they’re showing right now. Nobody wears masks anymore. It’s already too hot to eat outside. I wouldn’t bother going to FL right now.
I guess it depends on when you’re planning to go. Even so, FL in the summer sucks. Can you plan a meeting further up north?
Hi all, thank you very much and sincerely for your thoughtful and reasoned responses. They support my concerns and will definitely help me in making a decision on this.
A number of states have gone to intermittent reporting, and frankly the quality of data is suspect across the board notwithstanding that at-home self-testing with lateral flow tests is essentially not represented at all, but Florida is the one state where it is clear that they are manipulating statistics and actively withholding data. I would not trust any trends or lack thereof based upon Florida Department of Health data.
There are rising trends in various countries attributed to the spread of BA.4 and BA.5 variants, frequently in fully vaccinated or previously infected people; so far not a surge anywhere in the United States attributed to these but the US has typically been lagging Western Europe by 3-4 weeks in infections and then another ~3 weeks for a rise in hospitalizations. As much as people really want to pretend this pandemic is over, it is just not. I would assume that the o.p. may be exposed in transit or in Florida where no measures are being taken to retard contagion and plan accordingly.
So how exactly is someone supposed to determine how to navigate all this, if we can’t trust the CDC or our local county authorities? In my case, both say that we’re at the “new normal” and masks aren’t required in our county. That seems about as “over” as we’re likely to ever get.
Not to hijack, but I’m pretty frustrated with all this- it seems like we can’t get a straight answer of what the smart thing to do is. Should we wear masks? When? Where? When do we ditch them?
The “new normal” includes a dangerous and infectious disease that we didn’t have previously. Personally, I expect to wear a facemask in some situations, like public transit, for the rest of my life.
Just because we all hate having a nasty disease running amuck, and the risk isn’t all that huge for many people doesn’t mean it isn’t a significant risk for some. The OP has a household member who is immune compromised. If they bring home covid, it has a decent chance of a really bad outcome to that person.
Yeah, if you are a healthy slim 28 year old, who lives with other low-risk people, it’s probably fine for you, personally, to ignore covid. Sure, you may have a nasty illness from time to time, but maybe that’s better than taking precautions all the time.
The calculus is different for people at higher risk.
The CDC sucks at communication, and especially communicating nuance. The state of Florida appears to be actively trying to hide its covid risk. We have to make the best decisions we can despite those deficits in our public servants.
I’m actually meaning in a more nitty-gritty sense of if the authorities can’t be trusted, how do you actually determine when masks are and aren’t necessary?
My wife and I are in the middle of a bit of a dispute (not even an argument) about the necessity of masks in public places like restaurants, grocery stores, etc… I tend to think she’s just over-anxious, and she seems to think that the virus is still a clear and present danger, even though case counts and averages are near to the lowest points since the pandemic began in our area, and all the authorities say it’s fine to go maskless, even the Democrat ones.
What does it cost you to wear a mask in these situations? “Necessary” isn’t a yes/no thing unless there’s a law or something, it’s always a question of balancing costs and benefits.
Substitute “prudent” or some other words along those lines. Use the standard of a “reasonable person” if you like.
That’s where I’m a bit frustrated; by all accounts the virus is at historical low levels since the pandemic started- like 100 cases a day in a city of about 1.4 million. The chances of getting it are extremely low according to that math.
But there’s still some question about data fudging/data gaps, and more concerningly about whether at-home test kits are severely under-reporting the actual prevalence of the disease.
It’s not at historical more levels where i live. The levels are moderately high and rising. And i think they are expected to rise in the rest of the country, as well.
The source i mostly look at these days for “leading indicator” is sewage monitoring, because everyone poops. But “high and rising” is also corroborated by official case counts, percent positivity, and hospitalization numbers in the northeast, where i live.
Yeah, even before COVID, I wouldn’t have been terribly excited to visit Florida this time of year or in the next several months. But the combination of unbearably hot and humid weather, a virus that spreads so much more effectively indoors, and a willfully stupid population seemingly committed to spreading the virus by any means necessary? That’s a big, streaming, fetid pile of nope.
My personal and familial risk from COVID is pretty minimal, and I’m back to making personal lifestyle choices that don’t look that different from my pre-pandemic choices. I flew to Cozumel in April. I went to a large indoor convention last weekend. I’m no longer wearing a mask at the office, for the two days per week go in, and sometimes skip the mask when shopping too.
But going to Florida is one of the few things I would probably do differently now.
If your employer really wants you to go, I would insist on them accommodating and paying for a self-quarantine upon your return, to protect your immunocompromised wife. If they don’t think it’s worth it, they should rethink what they’re asking of you.
First of all, “case counts and averages” are not good metrics because many states are no longer making any real effort to track and trace, and the rise of at-home lateral flow tests being substituted for rtPCR tests (which are becoming increasingly hard to access) means that infection stats do not reflect actual spread of contagion. Hospitalizations arising from COVID-19 are a better metric (and while well below the Omnicron peak levels are still rising across the board in the United States) but they are a lagging indicator, often nearly a month behind a new wave of infections.
The CDC has done a pretty bad job on messaging (and if you think that is bad the World Health Organization has regularly blunted its warnings to placate donor nations who desire to minimize public concern) but if you listen to Dr. Fauci specifically he has been pretty on point about the need to continue to mask in crowded situations and on public transportation consistent with your own personal risk profile. It is clear that current vaccines are not going to end the pandemic as variants emerge with substantial ability to escape both acquired and vaccinated immunity despite the fact that people have been trying to downplay or deny this since the first reinfections were observed.
I dislike suggesting that in order to answer these questions you should just listen to a linked video or podcast but the latest episode of the Osterholm Update #104 by Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy addresses this very specifically, and in particular the fact that anyone making definitive statements about the status of the pandemic and future projections based upon the current suspect data is really just waving their hands.
Authorities are saying “it’s fine to go maskless” based upon public and political pressure rather than on any data-driven science, and while if you are fully vaccinated and boosted and not otherwise immunocompromised you are probably not going to suffer more than mild illness from ‘Omicron’ and previous strains, there is substantial uncertainty regarding post-acute sequelae (i.e. “long Covid”) and the effects that it may have other than it is clearly debilitating for a non-trivial proportion of infected people, even those with initial mild illness. Since we have not treatments or even definitive diagnosis it is a genuine concern that should not be dismissed out of hand.
Practically speaking, using medical grade respirator masks (KN94/95 or N95) masks is really the only way to assuredly protect yourself from infection in enclosed spaces and public transportation, especially since it is clear that vaccination is no longer a panacea against infection even against currently circulating strains much less emerging strains that may achieve greater degrees of immune escape. Characterizing someone as “over-anxious” for wanting this protection even if published case counts and trends are low is dismissing very real concerns and uncertainties about a pathogen that has killed a million people in the United States alone (and that is certainly an undercount, perhaps by more than a factor of two) as well as still aggressively circulating and mutating globally. I would certainly wear a mask from curb-to-curb if traveling by air (even if you accept the rationale that the frequent air exchange in commercial aircraft is sufficient to provide protection, an assertion that isn’t actually backed up by specific demonstration, your exposure in the airport, in crowded lines, and while people are loading and unloading from the aircraft is still elevated) and would be vary leery about specifically going to Florida with its politically-driven pressure to conceal and ignore evidence of contagion.
It wasn’t mentioned if either are vaccinated. But being in Canada at that date, they are likely both vaccinated.
So they can still catch and transmit Covid, but are hopefully protected from the worst effects of the spike protein. At this late date, the prevalent strain in wide circulation is the less ass kicking Omicron.
I would not be too concerned with going to FLA regarding Covid. It is likely you would get Omicron variety. I definitely had Omicron at 64 years of age. It was not so bad. But that is my individual experience.
In any case. I would isolate from your more vulnerable other for at least 5 days upon return. If you have no symptoms, then return to the cohabitation, with extra care and hygiene foir a few more days.
Four shots and had Omicron. What more can you do?
I may actually have caught the early Covid way back at the start. I had what I thought was a flu. But it went on to the point that I was frightened. I was on the verge of going to the emergency ward. But then it started backing off. Omicron was a breeze by comparison.
COVID is still rampant and a surge is on the horizon with new strains that aren’t making news any more. Vaccines do little to no good preventing infection for the newer strains (serious illness yes, but it’s no where close to immunity).
We had a big work event in California last week. Only about 5 people traveled in from out of state (I was one of them) the rest were local, but most hadn’t been going to the office. We had a series of internal meetings over a week with 25 or so people mixing and matching into a series of breakout sessions. So a fair bit of exposure across the board for everyone. No big dinners or anything with outside people, pretty much just office-hotel and back again for those of us who travelled.
Sure enough, on Monday when we got back there was a corporate email informing people that there were positive cases in the building we were in on another floor. The next day we learned that 2-3 people in these meetings ended up positive. One of whom I worked really closely with for all 4 days. Everyone was exposed. Many people have spent all week isolating and running out to get tests.
Fortunately I did not catch anything (likely because I caught Omicron before the holidays - in spite of boosters) and am back with the family. Seems like most people managed to either fend it off or were asymptomatic since we haven’t heard to many new stories a week later.
So take that anecdote as you will. It’s a risk for sure. But so is going to the grocery store. This is the new normal I’m afraid and everyone will probably need to come up with their own personal guidelines.