#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

[rosefox]

The risk factors are pretty clearly proximity and duration of interaction with someone infected. My understanding is that reliable tests for active infection and antibodies still aren't widely available where you are—is that right? Until they are, you have to assume everyone's infected and that's very restrictive. Once you're able to know your own immune status as well as your own and other people's active infection status, it will make a huge difference to the social part because your risk assessment and protective measures can be so much more specific. If it makes a difference to your mindset, you can think of whatever measures you decide to take now as temporary things that you'll revisit once accurate testing becomes available to you and everyone in your social group.

Now that we've had positive antibody and negative active infection tests, our calculations are mostly about keeping other people safe. We still don't go to stores or ride public transit, because an additional person in an enclosed space makes social distancing harder for everyone else. We wear masks when we go out and swerve to keep our distance from other passersby because those are good social habits to encourage and normalize. We're hiring a nanny but only interviewing candidates who live within walking distance, because we don't want to ask anyone to put themselves at risk by riding the subway to us every day. (Or cycling, which is quite risky on city streets even with reduced traffic.)

We have had two visits from friends, both of whom drove to see us. We're obviously not planning to throw a party for my birthday in two weeks, but we could plausibly have friends over one at a time: we're no risk to them and they're no risk to us, and if we space them out they're not a risk to one another. It still feels weird, though, in a slippery-slope way. I don't think anyone in our circle wants to be in the habit of paying social calls.

My mother's doctor approved me visiting her but says I still shouldn't hug her or go into her house, because she (78, sturdy but with an autoimmune condition) and her husband (93, frail, every pre-existing condition you could name) are so high-risk that it simply isn't worth even the microscopic chance of me somehow conveying active virus to them. They're well out of walking distance for me, so I'd have to go by cab/Lyft and could just conceivably pick up something on my clothes. I think Mom and I might try meeting in a park, putting on brand new plastic ponchos, and standing back to back so we can lean on each other; less absurdly, we could put on clean gloves and hold hands. Human contact is so vitally necessary, and at some point people find ways to make it happen.

We considered buying a car—Hertz is going bankrupt and selling off its fleet for very good prices, and we could get my ideal car for probably about $10k cash—but I just couldn't make myself do it. We'd hardly use it and it would be a huge hassle to park and maintain and there are other things we'd like to spend $10k on. Cycling and transit aren't options for reasons given above. So for now we're staying within walking distance from home, which for J and me is about a 3-mile radius (when my lungs are happy, which they still occasionally aren't) and for X is about a 1-mile radius. And mostly, to be honest, we're still staying indoors, because we're in the habit of it now.