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Imagine it’s November. Thanksgiving is in two weeks, and you’re planning to spend it with your family, which includes some vulnerable elders. A recent wave of viral infections makes you worry that you might infect your grandma, but you do not want to give up the opportunity for some quality family time.
How can you organize a safe Thanksgiving dinner?
The key principle for a safe unmasked gathering
When having an unmasked indoor gathering, the top priority should be to reduce the chances that any participant carries the virus inside the room.
A first step is to have all participants take a COVID test the morning of the gathering and to ask anyone positive or showing any symptoms to not attend the gathering this year. While useful, this is by no means sufficient (it might result in false negatives or might miss viruses other than COVID) and, to be frank, it’s annoying as hell – can you imagine preparing and traveling for a family gathering that you discover at the last minute you cannot attend?
Hence, the second step should be to minimize the chances that any participant is sick on the morning of the gathering. The best way to achieve that is for the participants to take some basic precautions the week before the gathering, such as:
– wearing good masks while in crowded indoors,
– preferably meeting others outdoors rather than indoors,
– temporarily withdraw from social meetings happening indoors.
The third step should be to try to make the Thanksgiving gathering as safe as possible. Being this an important social gathering, masks are probably not an option, hence the focus should be on improving air quality as much as possible – opening windows and/or using good air purifiers (they’re not that expensive – less than $100 can suffice).
Acceptable risk
Obviously, none of the precautions described above can nullify the risk of infection.
If zero were the only acceptable risk level, then the gathering should not take place. And if near zero were the only acceptable risk level, in addition to the recommendations above, the vulnerable should use the highest-grade masks.
But if a family decides that preserving a family tradition such as Thanksgiving is worth some level of risk, it is still possible to bring that risk to a very low level without sacrificing the quality of the gathering – by taking precautions not during the gathering but over the preceding days.
A general principle
In general, there are categories of preventive actions when it comes to indoor activities: those that occur before the gathering and those that occur during the gathering.
The activity’s risk level is roughly the product of the two. Given a risk level deemed acceptable, the more one takes precautions before the gathering, the less precautions they should take during the gathering, and the other way around.
Keeping schools without masking
During the coronavirus pandemic, students at some schools were required to wear masks. This has been a controversial policy.
On the one hand, wearing masks helps keep students healthy, which is important not just for their health (after all, kids are the age group less at risk from COVID) but also to keep them able to attend school and to reduce the likelihood that they spread the virus to their families, who might be more vulnerable than them.
On the other hand, wearing masks can be uncomfortable for children and – more importantly – it is still unclear whether its prolonged use might facilitate developmental delays in some children.
The key consideration should be that it’s possible to reduce viral spread within schools without using masks. It’s about improving the air quality of schools and lowering community spread outside the schools (so that children are less likely to come to school sick).
In general, the more there are specific situations we want to keep mask-free, such as family gatherings and schools, the more precautions should be taken outside of them. After all, the lower the community spread is, the safer every situation becomes.
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