Pandemic adventures
Aug. 23rd, 2021 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo I took a train for the first time in most of a year and a half.
I really desperately wanted to visit one of my favourite people who lives the other side of the country. They've been really good at talking to me regularly, even phonecalls which I know much of our generation hate, but I was really longing to be in the same physical space.
An 8 hour train journey is a really big jump up from no public transport at all! And we don't really have any consistent public health measures at the moment in England, and fewer than I'd like in the devolved nations. I did a lot of talking about it with my bubble, and looking at the case numbers skyrocketing again, and agonizing. In the end I decided that I'm fully vaccinated, and there's a good chance travel won't get any safer than it is now for really quite a long time.
The first fail was masks. I bought myself a fancy FFP2 mask from Cambridge Mask, which a few friends had recommended. I thought, given what we now know about transmission, a high-quality, well-fitted mask should give me at least some protection, as well as protecting others from me. The mask was indeed very well made and I could feel that it made a tight seal with my face, and it has a useful little pull-cord for tightening the mask over your chin. But I couldn't get it to stay on my head; I've never got on well with ear loops, maybe my ears are a weird shape or maybe I'm just incompetent. And they did provide head elastic but I couldn't figure out how to shorten the elastic so that it was tight across my head, or to attach it firmly to my earloops. As a result the mask kept slipping off, and obviously a mask is no use at all if it slips off, so I switched back to my usual fabric mask with head ties. I need to have another go with the FFP2 mask and possibly acquire one of a different design, disposable if need be though I'd rather have reusable.
I didn't feel good about the long train journey, not at all. In England most train companies ask passengers for masks but have no real enforcement and there is no overarching legal obligation to wear a mask. In my destination nation, it is a legal requirement to wear masks on trains and in stations, but again, there was no enforcement. Mask compliance didn't seem that different either side of the border; I mean, possibly that's because I was on a journey which crossed the border, but anyway. I think just about a majority of the passengers wore masks, but I had to count to see that it was more than half rather than less than half. And of the mask wearers, many wore masks round their chin, covering their mouth only, or they removed the mask to talk as well as to eat and drink. I have read that modern trains, even though they have unopenable windows, have pretty good air replacement rates, so I was reassuring myself about being in what felt like an enclosed space with dozens of unmasked strangers.
The second thing that went wrong was that my hosts invited another guest at the same time as me, and I discovered just in the course of casual chatting that this person isn't vaccinated (not anti-vax, just has not been able to get their second dose yet). There were good reasons why this invitation happened at short notice, and the person is absolutely lovely and in normal circumstances I'd have been completely delighted to have an unexpected opportunity to meet them. But none of my risk calculations or discussions with my bubble had included the prospect of spending three days indoors with an unvaccinated person.
My return home coincided with the visit of another dear friend who had moved abroad some months ago, and obviously it's been almost impossible to travel to visit each other for most of that time. Like me, they'd gone through lots of calculations before deciding to take the opportunity to visit friends back in England now, before the situation gets even worse. This friend is very much on my wavelength; we discussed our respective precautions in detail, and we concluded that my having recently been on a train with a mask that probably only provided source control protection meant that we should meet up outdoors only. So we did that and we had a lovely catch-up conversation.
I switched on the NHS app for the journey and didn't get any pings. I also got a negative in a rapid LFT at the time I judged I was most likely to be infectious if I had caught Covid on the train back. Neither of those things is fully reassuring but they're at least somewhat reassuring that on this occasion, I got away with a much higher risk than I've usually been taking. I think for now I will probably carry on like this: I'll restrict my in person socializing to friends who are happy to compare risks and exposures and negotiate a consensus about what sort of contact is acceptable. I probably won't take any more long train journeys at least until I've figured out a high-quality mask that works for me.
It's incredibly tiresome, obviously. I have nothing but sympathy for people who are less able to give up higher risk activities than I am, or people who don't have the energy for careful risk discussions with every person they meet, or indeed don't want to tell me every detail of their private lives so that I can make a risk judgement. Equally I have nothing but sympathy for people who are at greater risk than me and have to be more restricted in their activities and social life; if you're unbearably jealous and resentful that I got to go on a train to visit a friend, then I'm sorry.
From next month, we are restarting in person services at synagogue, though not for the major festivals around the New Year as we can't mitigate the sort of exceptional numbers we expect for the High Holy Days. There is going to be singing, while also asking anyone who can wear a mask to do so and anyone over 16 who is unvaccinated to stay at home. In my personal opinion that's probably good enough but I'm bubbled with unvaccinated children and we've agreed (the adults, I mean) that we shouldn't take part in person services if there is singing. So most likely I'm going to stay on Zoom.
Also I am going to be expected to turn up at work in person. I think this is probably fine as work are really keeping a close eye on transmission; they are reducing their precautions rather slower than the national road map, but they are going to be back to something close to normal working patterns with only a few mitigations by next month. The big one that they're keeping is that everybody does a full PCR test every fortnight (work pays) and they're extremely ready to return most people to remote if there is any chance that any person was infected while working on site. I basically think this is a reasonable compromise from work's perspective, now that most people are vaccinated. For me personally it's a big step-up in risk but I asked for, and got, permission to wait until I was double vaxed before returning so I think that's basically good enough.
It's getting increasingly urgent for me to deal with some stuff that requires me to go to places in person. I need new glasses and new shoes. And I need to get my 2 year out of date IUD replaced. These are I think reasonable one-off risks now I'm vaccinated; whether I can get an actual appointment alongside all the other people who've put off non-urgent healthcare, I don't know.
And the weather will get worse and the days will get shorter, so I think my window of any kind of in person socializing beyond my bubble is pretty much closing for 2021. Pre-Delta, I thought I would be mostly "free" by this summer, looking at the timescale for when my age group would be vaccinated. Then I thought we'd be back in lockdown by now, after removing all public health measures a month ago and relying on adult vaccination only (which hardly constitutes a strategy!) The thing I didn't predict was that people would self-restrict enough, in conjunction with vaccination, to keep hospitals just about running, but still have 100 deaths a day and a case rate I can't even think about and a lot of knock-on problems for non-Covid healthcare – and this would be considered politically acceptable!
I keep being wrong about things, but I find it difficult to let go of the assumption that a pandemic is always either doubling or halving. Maybe this is life now, forever, because the pandemic sure as hell isn't going away if we fail to vaccinate children or the majority of the world. In that case, I have a lifestyle I can keep up. I'll keep on organizing treats in the form of driving to mostly outdoor places, such as a brilliant trip to the beach at Hunstanton yesterday, withghoti_mhic_uait, her one-year-old, and a three-month-old puppy. I'll continue the practice I've just started since I got my second jab, of occasionally doing higher risk things such as a long train trip or a more extended business / medical visit than just dashing into the shop and out again. And probably I will eventually pick up a breakthrough infection but most likely it won't be terrible. My main fear is that I won't notice until it's too late and I'll infect someone more vulnerable than me.
I don't really expect this situation to be sustainable, though. Businesses are more and more forcing people back to in person work (including my own extremely generous employer). Schools start back up in England with no mitigations at all and mass mixing of unvaccinated people, and young people still have huge prevalence of Covid infections even after the summer holidays. And everybody will be indoors more as the year draws in. And there will be winter flu, and more and more staff leaving the NHS whether voluntarily or through ill-health. So even though 10s of thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths a day doesn't feel at all comfortable, I fully expect things to get even worse as the year progresses.
Anyway, that's where I am. Still basically fine personally, still anxious about the country and the world.
I really desperately wanted to visit one of my favourite people who lives the other side of the country. They've been really good at talking to me regularly, even phonecalls which I know much of our generation hate, but I was really longing to be in the same physical space.
An 8 hour train journey is a really big jump up from no public transport at all! And we don't really have any consistent public health measures at the moment in England, and fewer than I'd like in the devolved nations. I did a lot of talking about it with my bubble, and looking at the case numbers skyrocketing again, and agonizing. In the end I decided that I'm fully vaccinated, and there's a good chance travel won't get any safer than it is now for really quite a long time.
The first fail was masks. I bought myself a fancy FFP2 mask from Cambridge Mask, which a few friends had recommended. I thought, given what we now know about transmission, a high-quality, well-fitted mask should give me at least some protection, as well as protecting others from me. The mask was indeed very well made and I could feel that it made a tight seal with my face, and it has a useful little pull-cord for tightening the mask over your chin. But I couldn't get it to stay on my head; I've never got on well with ear loops, maybe my ears are a weird shape or maybe I'm just incompetent. And they did provide head elastic but I couldn't figure out how to shorten the elastic so that it was tight across my head, or to attach it firmly to my earloops. As a result the mask kept slipping off, and obviously a mask is no use at all if it slips off, so I switched back to my usual fabric mask with head ties. I need to have another go with the FFP2 mask and possibly acquire one of a different design, disposable if need be though I'd rather have reusable.
I didn't feel good about the long train journey, not at all. In England most train companies ask passengers for masks but have no real enforcement and there is no overarching legal obligation to wear a mask. In my destination nation, it is a legal requirement to wear masks on trains and in stations, but again, there was no enforcement. Mask compliance didn't seem that different either side of the border; I mean, possibly that's because I was on a journey which crossed the border, but anyway. I think just about a majority of the passengers wore masks, but I had to count to see that it was more than half rather than less than half. And of the mask wearers, many wore masks round their chin, covering their mouth only, or they removed the mask to talk as well as to eat and drink. I have read that modern trains, even though they have unopenable windows, have pretty good air replacement rates, so I was reassuring myself about being in what felt like an enclosed space with dozens of unmasked strangers.
The second thing that went wrong was that my hosts invited another guest at the same time as me, and I discovered just in the course of casual chatting that this person isn't vaccinated (not anti-vax, just has not been able to get their second dose yet). There were good reasons why this invitation happened at short notice, and the person is absolutely lovely and in normal circumstances I'd have been completely delighted to have an unexpected opportunity to meet them. But none of my risk calculations or discussions with my bubble had included the prospect of spending three days indoors with an unvaccinated person.
My return home coincided with the visit of another dear friend who had moved abroad some months ago, and obviously it's been almost impossible to travel to visit each other for most of that time. Like me, they'd gone through lots of calculations before deciding to take the opportunity to visit friends back in England now, before the situation gets even worse. This friend is very much on my wavelength; we discussed our respective precautions in detail, and we concluded that my having recently been on a train with a mask that probably only provided source control protection meant that we should meet up outdoors only. So we did that and we had a lovely catch-up conversation.
I switched on the NHS app for the journey and didn't get any pings. I also got a negative in a rapid LFT at the time I judged I was most likely to be infectious if I had caught Covid on the train back. Neither of those things is fully reassuring but they're at least somewhat reassuring that on this occasion, I got away with a much higher risk than I've usually been taking. I think for now I will probably carry on like this: I'll restrict my in person socializing to friends who are happy to compare risks and exposures and negotiate a consensus about what sort of contact is acceptable. I probably won't take any more long train journeys at least until I've figured out a high-quality mask that works for me.
It's incredibly tiresome, obviously. I have nothing but sympathy for people who are less able to give up higher risk activities than I am, or people who don't have the energy for careful risk discussions with every person they meet, or indeed don't want to tell me every detail of their private lives so that I can make a risk judgement. Equally I have nothing but sympathy for people who are at greater risk than me and have to be more restricted in their activities and social life; if you're unbearably jealous and resentful that I got to go on a train to visit a friend, then I'm sorry.
From next month, we are restarting in person services at synagogue, though not for the major festivals around the New Year as we can't mitigate the sort of exceptional numbers we expect for the High Holy Days. There is going to be singing, while also asking anyone who can wear a mask to do so and anyone over 16 who is unvaccinated to stay at home. In my personal opinion that's probably good enough but I'm bubbled with unvaccinated children and we've agreed (the adults, I mean) that we shouldn't take part in person services if there is singing. So most likely I'm going to stay on Zoom.
Also I am going to be expected to turn up at work in person. I think this is probably fine as work are really keeping a close eye on transmission; they are reducing their precautions rather slower than the national road map, but they are going to be back to something close to normal working patterns with only a few mitigations by next month. The big one that they're keeping is that everybody does a full PCR test every fortnight (work pays) and they're extremely ready to return most people to remote if there is any chance that any person was infected while working on site. I basically think this is a reasonable compromise from work's perspective, now that most people are vaccinated. For me personally it's a big step-up in risk but I asked for, and got, permission to wait until I was double vaxed before returning so I think that's basically good enough.
It's getting increasingly urgent for me to deal with some stuff that requires me to go to places in person. I need new glasses and new shoes. And I need to get my 2 year out of date IUD replaced. These are I think reasonable one-off risks now I'm vaccinated; whether I can get an actual appointment alongside all the other people who've put off non-urgent healthcare, I don't know.
And the weather will get worse and the days will get shorter, so I think my window of any kind of in person socializing beyond my bubble is pretty much closing for 2021. Pre-Delta, I thought I would be mostly "free" by this summer, looking at the timescale for when my age group would be vaccinated. Then I thought we'd be back in lockdown by now, after removing all public health measures a month ago and relying on adult vaccination only (which hardly constitutes a strategy!) The thing I didn't predict was that people would self-restrict enough, in conjunction with vaccination, to keep hospitals just about running, but still have 100 deaths a day and a case rate I can't even think about and a lot of knock-on problems for non-Covid healthcare – and this would be considered politically acceptable!
I keep being wrong about things, but I find it difficult to let go of the assumption that a pandemic is always either doubling or halving. Maybe this is life now, forever, because the pandemic sure as hell isn't going away if we fail to vaccinate children or the majority of the world. In that case, I have a lifestyle I can keep up. I'll keep on organizing treats in the form of driving to mostly outdoor places, such as a brilliant trip to the beach at Hunstanton yesterday, with
ghoti_mhic_uait, her one-year-old, and a three-month-old puppy. I'll continue the practice I've just started since I got my second jab, of occasionally doing higher risk things such as a long train trip or a more extended business / medical visit than just dashing into the shop and out again. And probably I will eventually pick up a breakthrough infection but most likely it won't be terrible. My main fear is that I won't notice until it's too late and I'll infect someone more vulnerable than me.I don't really expect this situation to be sustainable, though. Businesses are more and more forcing people back to in person work (including my own extremely generous employer). Schools start back up in England with no mitigations at all and mass mixing of unvaccinated people, and young people still have huge prevalence of Covid infections even after the summer holidays. And everybody will be indoors more as the year draws in. And there will be winter flu, and more and more staff leaving the NHS whether voluntarily or through ill-health. So even though 10s of thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths a day doesn't feel at all comfortable, I fully expect things to get even worse as the year progresses.
Anyway, that's where I am. Still basically fine personally, still anxious about the country and the world.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-08-24 10:08 am (UTC)