So, Jennifer and I have scaled back our plans for Thanksgiving. We weren’t going to have a big group. Aside from my mother, we had only invited two other people, friends whom we consider to be part of our “pandemic bubble.” We’re all being careful
But here’s the thing about pandemic bubbles: everyone in your bubble probably has other people inside their bubble. If there are five people I consider safe to be with, and each of them has five people they consider safe to be with, then I’m not really in a bubble of five people, I’m in a bubble of twenty-five people. And no matter how careful everyone is being, the risk of exposure to the coronavirus increases with every additional person.
That’s because all but the most careful of us still go to the grocery store and at least a few other places where we encounter other people indoors. Aside from the supermarket, in the past week I’ve been to a jewelry store to get a necklace of my mother’s repaired, Best Buy to drop off a dead printer for recycling, and a local garage to have my car serviced. The week before that there was the UPS Store to drop off an Amazon return and the local dry cleaners.
I wear a mask, of course, and most of the people I encounter are wearing one too (though surprisingly, the proprietor of the jewelry store wasn’t — more on that another time).
I don’t know precisely what the risk is of going into Best Buy for three minutes, or spending half an hour in the supermarket, but I know two things: the risk is greater than zero, and it’s increasing as the pandemic surges. The point is, almost all of us are incurring at least some risk of infection. And whatever that risk is, it increases for every person we include in our bubble, and every person they include in their bubble.
With the case count continuing to rise, Jennifer and I found ourselves reassessing the activities that seemed reasonably safe during the summer when the infection rate in New Jersey was much lower. The degree to which we were exposing ourselves, and by extension my 90-year old mother, to other people a month ago carries an increasingly greater risk than it did then. At what point should we change our behavior?
Last week we decided the answer was now. From now on I’m not going to go anywhere that I don’t have to go before the pandemic is over. That printer, for example, could have easily stayed in the basement for another six months.
And, regrettably, there will be only three of us at the Thanksgiving table next week rather than five.