The family and holiday questions will be tricky.
Here, we’re simply decisive about Thanksgiving. Others’ plans are starting to enter the national dialogue: Anthony Fauci is telling people to not do Thanksgiving now. His kids are at all four corners and the travel would make it a bad idea. The CDC, it seems, is gearing up to push these unpleasant messages.
We’re about to hit a third Covid case peak any minute now. Maybe a travel holiday makes a fourth? No thanks. My worry, and may it go unrealized, is that we see bad numbers by the third week of December based on Thanksgiving. Christmas is already going to be maudlin in that not-normal way, but it’s potentially going to be like that under the specter of “We were that dangerously impulsive over dry turkey?”
There are two primary problems. Say I get a cootie in my day-to-day professional life. Say I took it to people who didn’t have the cooties. People who are older, who have worked hard to stay healthy. I would, of course, never forgive myself for endangering people I care about. That’s the personal problem. The other is travel. For some, who’s family is just across town, getting there probably doesn’t expose yourself or endanger an entire community. Simple car ride, done. To see my mom, that’s somewhat more risky. I’m gassing up at least once, making a bathroom stop or two, and picking up take out along the way. If you were getting on a plane, doing rest stops, making big travel plans, running travel errands, having to hit restaurants along the way? Wholly different model.
Recently, TSA cleared a million travelers for the first time since the spring. Eventually we get to a critical point of mass. People bring their behaviors, their errors, their accidental transference, and it adds up. That airplane the sick guy is on, the people on his flight potentially take the cootie home to others. From the airport bar where he waits for his connection, someone catching a red eye pick it up, and takes it home to their aunties. Same for the guy making the drinks at the airport bar.
It’s not just my trip, but every joker out there doing the same thing, its compounding interest.
If big events — like Sturgis and political rallies and Rose Garden announcements — are super spreaders, then the next level is the travel spreaders set, the micro-event set. I might be coming from a hotspot to a cooler place. Or vice versa, pending my return. Consider whatever your bunch normally does, 25 people in a house the family outgrew two generations ago? No thanks. I’ll give my thanks from afar.
It boils down to degrees of selfishness. I could do Thanksgiving. Or I could try my darnedest to not risk myself, or others, getting sick.
The more vigilant I am now, the slightly more confident I can be that I’m not gambling with the health of my family if I properly isolate myself before Christmas: I have been cautious.
Which is what the holidays should also be right now, cautious. I can continue to be cautious for myself, and others.
Not everyone can stay in as much as I’m able. I appreciate that. Not everyone is built for it. Introverts will inherit the earth. But I can make the considerable, deliberate choice to not travel, to limit my time in public, for a greater good.
My employer has taken great steps to create a proactive safety culture (and an astoundingly successful one, so far) and is spooling up massive amounts of testing to that end. My job isn’t especially forward-facing after we’ve scaled down on-campus operations and I am diligent about limiting my time outside of the house. It’s worth honoring those efforts and my good fortune.
I am fortunate. I can limit time out to help avoid making a lot of stupid, human mistakes. (Just two so far!) It doesn’t guarantee my health, but it reduces my risk. I have been afforded, and undertaken a great many steps to help create, a fair degree of safety. None of that means I feel especially comfortable risking someone’s health at Thanksgiving.
Like all spring and summer, this remains an easy and small and helpful thing we can do right now: avoiding the unnecessary. Sadly, the usual holiday routine falls in there too. It’ll be harder and bigger and families will feel fractured, but nevertheless, it’s the helpful thing we can do.
The considerate thing.
