Turkey Day is a week away, and for the most part, officials haven’t spent a minute telling people how to gather safely. The prevailing guidance suggests there is simply no safe way to get together.
A bipartisan group of seven governors penned an op-ed urging people to “make short-term sacrifices for our long-term health” and “get together with your family via Zoom.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has instituted a 10-guest maximum.
It’s true that the risk for transmission of the coronavirus could virtually never be zero, but this posture is puzzling because for months, officials have endorsed various health measures meant to reduce the risk of one’s catching and transmitting of the virus and one would think, by extension, to justify participation in various activities.
Yet, public health officials and state and local executives are furiously advising against Thanksgiving gatherings. Officials treat the idea of a safe Thanksgiving guidance the same way that opponents treat Philadelphia’s needle exchange initiative: that it serves as a kind of public blessing or encouragement of bad behavior. Those arguments have been stressed elsewhere in the news media.
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote this back in August: “Short of a vaccine, mass testing is among the most plausible paths back to some kind of normalcy.” Yet this week, she offered her “no. 1 Thanksgiving tip,” which is: “Don’t gather this year.” Here is one of her reasons: “Tests fail. A lot. Many folks proudly tell me they’re using tests to make sure their Thanksgiving is safe. But even the most accurate tests miss a significant number of infections.”
The testing regime does have problems. Rapid antigen tests are especially fallacious. Alabama head football coach Nick Saban experienced this firsthand, as have several people I know of who have gotten false positives.
Tests can provide a false sense of security with false negatives, too, as McArdle points to the White House. There’s no getting around that, though the PCR tests work pretty well. If testing can be “among the most plausible paths back to some kind of normalcy” in an abstract and broad societal sense, why can’t it be considered a plausible path to a normal family Thanksgiving?
Aside from testing, there is self-quarantining. If you don’t go anywhere, you basically knock out the risk of catching the virus. Many people have an advantage to be able to do it. A survey commissioned by Stanford University and conducted in late May found that 42% of the labor force was working from home full time. A more recent Gallup survey found that in September, that number was 33%.
The number has dropped, but it remains that a large percentage of workers do work from home and even more at least have the capacity to work from home, if they aren’t already, and so can quarantine before gathering. For those who can’t quarantine, they can get tested.
Beyond testing and quarantining, weather and adequate heat sources permitting, families can gather and dine outside to further reduce risk. Airplanes themselves are not hotbeds of COVID-19 spread, but to reduce interaction with others, families traveling far might drive instead of fly.
Those arguing for cancellation undervalue testing, self-quarantining, and other mitigation measures and seem to accept the notion that if you gather, it’s a shoo-in that someone will get sick. It’s obviously possible, but there are ways to reduce the risk. That’s why public health officials have been stressing them for months.
