#PeoplesLockdown

[liv]

Cut because lots of people are avoiding plague or politics or both.

I have been pretty unimpressed by the government handling of the pandemic from the start, but now it's an utter shambles. It's pretty clear that not only are they banning activities that are safe and permitting activities that are highly dangerous, but by now they have no intention of actually enforcing anything. (Unless they want to target political undesirables, in which case there's almost certainly some kind of offence they can claim someone has committed, and due process is an unaffordable luxury during a pandemic.) The law and guidelines change almost randomly every five minutes, and there's not even a figleaf pretense that anything is self-consistent, let alone consideration for how it is supposed to be possible for businesses or individuals to comply in practical reality.

As we are all painfully aware the pandemic isn't even slightly over. Even the most generous estimates that are barely more than propaganda are suggesting an R number close to 1 and hundreds of deaths daily. So basically I am giving up even tracking the law / guidance / advice / government briefings / media reports, because it's all nonsense. I think we're on our own, we just have to do our best to avoid getting sick or infecting others.

Also, jack is understandably getting fed up with me constantly worrying over this. So if there's anyone who has opinions about what people in England should be doing and wouldn't mind helping me think this through, I would be most grateful. Note: I have no interest in discussing what you think the law actually states, or ~hilarious~ edge cases like being allowed to have sex with someone if you pay them. The law is toothless and dangerously muddled, the guidance is IMO meaningless. I'm interested in discussing what you personally judge is safe behaviour during the current stage of the pandemic. And yes, I understand that completely avoiding any interaction with other people has its own dangers.

Equally that breaking the law carries a risk in its own right, depending on your personal circumstances. I know it can be unwise to post on social media that you intend to break the law, but I really really doubt that anyone's going to arrest me for speculating about whether I might hug a partner who lives in a different household from me. If you feel uncomfortable with joining in this discussion for this reason, that's completely understandable; anon comments are on if that's a level of security that works for you.

I intend to continue staying mostly at home. I'm basically happy to go out for walks a few times a week, avoiding crowded areas. I'm going to make effort to maintain at least 2m separation and more if possible, including swerving to avoid people (which has been my practice since early March anyway.) I haven't up to now been wearing masks outdoors but I'm thinking that possibly I should if only to help to shift social norms. I'm equally happy to sit around admiring the view as I am to do active stuff, but if I go to a beauty spot and find it crowded I'm going to turn around and go somewhere else. I'm also fine with cycling, again avoiding crowds and pinch-points but not worrying too much about a second or so of passing another person.

I am not going to go to work. I am fortunate that my employer entirely supports me in this; they are planning for office workers to be remote probably until the end of the year. I am making a plan to make a single visit to campus to film some material, and have discussed with the videographer how we will maintain social distancing by doing so. I am not sure how I'll get there; taxi seems the least bad option but I'm a bit nervous about that.

I don't have children. If I did I think I probably wouldn't send them to school, but there are lots of factors affecting that decision, including the feelings of the hypothetical children and how hard it was to work while they were at home.

I am doing my best to avoid entering physical shops, though I might do so if there were no other way to obtain something I need. If I did go into a shop I would definitely wear a (non-medical, cloth) mask. We are fortunate that we can afford and have access to pretty much everything we need by delivery. I haven't been in a shop at all since mid-March, and jack has only entered shops a couple of times since then. I'm not planning on going to any pubs or sit-in restaurants any time soon, even if they maintain physical distancing between customers. I'm sticking to ordering takeaway that can be delivered, not takeaway that has to be collected.

I'm not going to synagogue. The synagogue is currently closed and has no plans to reopen. If it did I would probably continue joining from home (they're definitely going to make that option possible.) If we went back to the plan we had before the official lockdown, where three or four people leading the service attend in person, maintaining social distancing while broadcasting the actual service from the synagogue itself, I would consider joining the service team. But I'm not sure about that because it would involve singing, and even four people singing from two metres apart inside a closed room looks like it's a risk. The main advantage of that would be that we could use our Torah scrolls again, and... yes, I do miss reading from a real Torah but I'm both sufficiently Reform and sufficiently pragmatic to accept that reading from a book is very nearly as good given that's safe and the more ritually appropriate option is risky.

I am not at all happy with taking public transport. I would if it were a medical emergency, but I think not for any lesser reason than that. Driving... driving is something I feel morally conflicted about even in normal times, and it's worse because I personally don't drive, so it means relying on jack to give me a lift. I think driving short distances isn't itself unsafe; I mean, all the time you spend on the road increases the chances of an accident, so I would not be in favour of driving all over the country every day. We have once gone out just 'for a drive', going to a village that's a bit further out than we're comfortable cycling, and I think that's probably ok occasionally though I'm not going to make a regular habit of it. We have also driven a couple of times to collect things that couldn't be delivered. We plan to make a car trip to London (a part of it that's reasonably accessible by car!) to drop some needed possessions off with a friend who is precariously housed and is currently storing things at our place. I am not comfortable with offering lifts to anyone else in our car (though if it was a medical emergency I'd make an exception.)

Seeing people. This one is the hardest. My interpretation is that the safest thing is to pick a small, closed group of people and just interlink them. So spend time together in normal ways, indoors or outdoors, as near each other as you'd normally want to approach. But currently the people I'd most want to link with, my non household partners, are not comfortable with that so it's not going to happen in practice. I'm not at all excited about meeting ever-changing groups of up to 6 people outdoors at 2m distance, because that means lots of potentially infectious contact with lots of different people, and also the distancing is going to encourage shouting which somewhat defeats the point of the distancing. I do meet my partners who live less than a mile away, only a couple of times a week at most, and we always stay outdoors and 2m apart. So currently I can't really agree to hang out in person with anyone else because that would change my risk profile for how I interact with them.

I'm not going to visit my parents since they are over 70 and my significantly disabled brother is currently sheltering with them. (We did visit that household once to bring him some medication; we travelled by car, and left the medicine on the doorstep, and had a brief conversation from at least 2m away.)

So, what do you think? What's the best way to keep safe at this point? Or rather, the best way to balance risk of infection with risk due to isolation, and financial loss? I would like to have this discussion from a position of balancing harms, and I will delete judgy comments directed towards people participating in the discussion. If you consider my or someone else's practice unsafe, or over-cautious, fair enough, but name-calling isn't going to help.

Comments

[aldabra]

This whole thing works super-poorly with poly.

I'm watching the government advice closely, but I don't think they're motivated by the well-being of individuals and I don't think they're intellectually honest. We're not doing things *because* the government tells us they're safe, but there are things that are currently prohibited that would be within my risk tolerance if they were allowed, and I'm much more concerned about risk than legality. Fortunately K's instincts are closely aligned with mine; we have no significant intra-household disagreements on what is appropriate behaviour.

The closed-bubble deal isn't going to work for us, though I would totally do it if it did. But I have a boyfriend and K has a boyfriend and K has a father who lives elsewhere and K's boyfriend also has a father who lives elsewhere and we are already into uncontrollable multiple-household nightmare at that point. There's no way of drawing a boundary. OTOH, I trust the risk-responsibility of the individual households (not as far out as K's boyfriend's dad, about whom I have no reliable information, but out as far as K's boyfriend who presumably does...). We're currently doing occasional outdoors socially-distanced meetings with one chap each, and we met K's dad for a socially distanced lunch in the park on Friday, which I think was technically illegal then but wouldn't be now.

I'm not seeing my other chap at all, because that's a train ride to That London. I'm probably not going to see him this year, if the second wave pans out as I'm expecting.

Maskwise, I've recently started wearing cloth masks in shops and in queues, so once going on twice a week. I'm not wearing them in the street, partly because I think they get less effective after about fifteen minutes and I'd rather they were maximally effective in the damn shop. I think there's a strong social signalling component to this: I don't think it does much good individually, but it would be great if everyone did it. I'm tetchy about people running and biking on the pavements, which there is a lot of on our bit of Arbury Road; they tend not to do distancing, so I have to for them, and I bet two metres isn't far enough when people are breathing heavily with exertion.

I'm driving to Tesco, in a zipcar, about once a week. I never did this before lockdown; I did little shops to pick up supper on the way home from work most days. Now I'm doing household-weekly-shops, for us and for Jemima (who is 82 and shielding), and the bike isn't a runner. I feel less safe in the zipcar than I would in our own car, if we had one, but not enough so to be disinfecting it. (Driving in my own car would be well within my covid risk tolerance, if we had a car. Going to the allotment is well within my risk tolerance.)

[rosefox]

This whole thing works super-poorly with poly.

It really does. As soon as we got our positive antibody tests, J's partner S came over, and S mentioned that hir husband's girlfriend was visiting for the weekend because her parents are moving in with her soon so she's about to self-quarantine for three weeks to be certain she's safe for them to live with, and I had quite a moment of feeling this was already more people than I wanted in my bubble even though I can't catch covid again! (I know all the caveats for that claim.)

I have found it interesting to see how many people I know who are or have been in the play party scene are adopting a very similar risk reduction approach: get tested regularly, ask the people you interact with to do likewise, use barriers more than you'd like but maybe not as much as health officials think you should, keep having fun because life's too short to isolate yourself forever.

[seekingferret]

I'm sorry, I hadn't heard the idea that masks lose effectiveness after fifteen minutes. What's your reasoning for that? Is this a particular kind of mask you're talking about?

[aldabra]

Cloth masks, because they start to get damp from the moisture from your breathing. I'm not following this closely and I don't have references; I reckon they're primarily there to catch coughs and sneezes, and they'll do that even if damp, and they're not going to be worse than not wearing them even if damp. I'm only wearing them for socially-distanced shopping; if work made me go back to an actual office I would look this up again and see if I still think it's true.