In Year Three of the pandemic, the question of whether we’ll ever be able to plan visits, vacations, and outings with confidence is one worth considering.
In Year Three of the pandemic, the question of whether we’ll ever be able to plan visits, vacations, and outings with confidence is one worth considering.
W e had just finished cooking our New Year’s Eve dinner and were preparing to gather. Then came the ominous words from our three-year-old son, who over the course of an hour had lost some of his trademark effervescence: “I’m not feeling well.”
Rip open the test. Scramble to read the instructions. Then wait 15 minutes? Ha! Within five, I could see our guest and my sister-in-law huddled over the Covid test, discussing its incipient results in hushed tones: positive, obviously. Within another 15 minutes, we had scooted our guest and her son out the door, packing them up dinner to go and tending to our ailing kid. This was supposed to be a long weekend with the family in Philadelphia; we left early the next morning.
It was not a huge inconvenience, and the story ends with the bystanders (including this author) recovering from infections spread about by Little Patient Zero. I would wager most readers out there have stories like this, many involving far more frustrating circumstances relating to canceled flights and interrupted visits home. As with so much of the pandemic experience, all of this is digestible as a temporary concession for the greater good.
But as a permanent factor? We’ve already had to weigh that question as it pertains to masking, vaccine passports, and other rules. An area I don’t think we’ve appreciated enough is how our Covid-testing protocols could impact a most fundamental aspect of life long-term — the ability to make plans.
Any plans at all.
Air travel is the most obvious casualty here. The variables that threaten to scramble your average trip were already legion before Covid-19 struck. Now, passengers face the double threat of flights canceled or delayed due to staffing shortages linked to the virus and of flights missed due to their own exposure.
Over the holiday period, U.S. airlines canceled more than 10,000 flights and delayed thousands of others, with bad weather as a factor alongside coronavirus. On the customer end, the booking process is akin to making plans in your 20s — you’ll try and make it, and see what happens.
The current CDC guidance for travelers is a minefield of potential schedule derailments. Don’t travel if sick. Don’t travel if Covid-positive and still in isolation, and until a full ten days have elapsed from the manifestation of symptoms or the thin vertical line on the Covid test. Don’t travel if you have been “exposed” to Covid-19 and are waiting for a test or haven’t waited ten days since close contact with the infected person.
On and on it goes. International travel, as anybody who has tried it during the pandemic knows, is infinitely more complicated and treacherous. But even domestic travel, to which the above guidelines apply, is, to use the technical term, a total crapshoot. Add in airlines’ individual policies, and the takeaway is that a coughing family member or contact with a sick individual at work is enough to kill plans under the guidelines.
Travel could yet become more uncertain. The White House reportedly explored the option last year of imposing vaccine mandates or testing requirements for domestic flights but backed off amid legal concerns. The debate is not over. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and several Democratic House members last month urged the Biden administration to require proof of vaccination or a negative test to board a domestic flight.
“International travelers arriving in the United States must already submit COVID-19-related documentation to airlines before boarding their flight, and airlines are demonstrating they have the capacity to implement these vaccine and testing requirements,” they wrote.
Getting the vaccine — a step everybody should take — is the obvious way to avoid this hassle. But that doesn’t help families with young kids who don’t have access to the shot.
Flying, of course, is not the only quotidian aspect of life that is changing. Planning for virtually any social and/or family occasion, as with our fizzled Philly feast, is an exercise in hypotheticals. Minor cold symptoms, in simpler times, would not be cause to beg off meeting up for drinks; you’d simply tell your friends not to get close or share food. Now, it’s a common excuse. Custom and courtesy are beginning to dictate, for some anyway, that we test before receiving company or becoming someone else’s company.
Anyone with kids can attest to how all plans are tentative anyway. Covid contingencies add another off-ramp, and maybe the misanthropic among us can be grateful for that. (I, too, dabble in the art of contactless living.) But the pandemic already has deepened our modern anti-social tendencies; a full life can be lived within walking distance of the house. Even the hoverchair-confined humans in WALL-E felt the initiative to shuttle around town.
Ideally, we can at least get to a point where mere exposure concerns no longer compel us, whether by rule or practice, to stay home in all cases. This might sound reckless, but the reality is that these steps mostly protect the unvaccinated — those most at risk of serious complications or death from Covid-19 and who have a choice still to reduce that risk. For everyone else, barring the advent of a deadlier variant, judgment should come into play. Visiting grandma after known exposure is not a good idea, but joining vaxxed friends in their 30s should not be out of the question.
Whether these strictures last won’t come down to one person or agency. The CDC, the FAA, the airlines, Amtrak, and the American people all have a say. Apathy and familiarity — along with low risk tolerance — could easily make a habit of the provisional life.
But another easy-to-flip circuit breaker for the grid of human interaction is bound to leave us poorer for it.