Latest coronavirus developments?

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21

Yeah, I agree that being strictly scrupulous is unrealistic, most people are not doing that, and people don’t have a good answer for this.

I think a lot of authorities (e.g. workplaces/management) are purposely giving somewhat vague answers about this, while having overly strict explicit rules. Like, they will basically say to take any symptoms seriously, and treat them like maybe covid. If their employees actually do take this seriously, and end up repeatedly missing work and getting tested for symptoms that turn out to not be covid, then the boss will be mad about the employee missing a lot of work.

What they really want is for the employee to not take it seriously, but to do so in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell way, where they hide their symptoms at work. Then most of the time it will be totally fine, the employee won’t have had covid, and no one will ever even know. And in the rarer cases that the employee did have covid, and passes it on to other people, management can just blame the employee because he didn’t follow the rules.

Regarding what people should do if they have any kind of symptoms, they have to use their best judgement. Lots of people regularly get headaches, IBS symptoms, allergy symptoms, etc, and I don’t think it makes sense to get tested and avoid everything when they are your normal, baseline symptoms.

Right, I think people should try to avoid passing on any viruses to others, even if they are sure it is just a cold. I have seen lots of cases of people ignoring rules and hiding symptoms because they are sure that it’s “just a cold”. For one thing, a lot of those people have not even gotten tested, so they have no way of knowing that. But, also, you shouldn’t be passing on colds to other people (against their will) right now either.

For you personally, a test may not be necessary. A lot of jurisdictions have said that if you are going to be quarantining at home there is no need for a test. One reason to get a test would be if you exposed someone else, and they wanted to know if they were exposed to covid. A lot of the time people are getting tested just to rule out covid, so they can go back to work. If they were willing to just quarantine at home, there would be no need to get a test.

I think if you are going to choose to not get a test, while thinking that you might actually have covid, then you should still quarantine and act as if you had it.

I think it might be that your preferences & lifestyle are actually outliers.

Like, you said:

For a lot of people, the fact that they were mostly quarantine for the last year is a reason that they don’t want to get stuck quarantining now. They hated it, and they are sick of staying at home all the time. They want to go back to work, they want to be able to meet up with their friends, travel, get their hair cut, go to restaurants, go to movies, etc.

And a lot of people are working outside of the home now – either because their job has always been outside of the home or because their office is moving everyone back to work. (And, also, unemployment is requiring people to look for work again.) So for those people, missing work can be a really big deal.

Also, a lot of people have contacts outside of their household that they want to be able to keep seeing, and some of those are vulnerable people (e.g. young nieces & nephews, or elderly parents & grandparents). And a lot of people have travel plans that they don’t want to have to miss/change.

If you don’t mind quarantining, have no high risk household members or regular contacts, don’t actually want to go out and do stuff (or don’t mind missing it and being stuck inside for 10-14 days), work from home, etc, all of those things together make you an outlier.

So it’s possible that for you, personally, the impact of getting inconvenience-level covid is low, and not worth the trouble of wearing N95 masks to avoid (especially since you find N95 masks to be an inconvenience). But for a lot of other people, their situation is different.

(Also, just wanna note - I also disagreed with another part of your original post, about the assessment of the risk to other people & what people should be doing on a society-wide level about that, I just haven’t replied to that part yet.)

22

My impression is that most of the people who “hated it” didn’t actually do it. Certainly not for most of last year. Regulations where I live were never actually very strict even at their height. Ex: never mind stuff like groceries and medicine, stuff like shopping for a new house or car or couch or building materials were considered “essential” and never shut down and were official exceptions to stay at home orders. And for the most part they boomed, suffering a short dip in April when people were actually concerned but then finishing 2020 with record sales.

Even the regulations that existed were not widely or consistently enforced. Flaunting them was pretty widespread and notorious around here, with even a few of the businesses that were ordered to close staying open and…nothing much happening to the owners? I didn’t follow these stories closely so maybe the owners ended up actually getting shut down and/or fined. But they didn’t appear to lack customers / supporters. And lots of churches continued to hold in-person services either the whole time or with only a few week’s closure, arguing the first amendment protected them from any closure order.

And the restrictions were pretty rapidly relaxed from the height - I think sometime around May or June 2020 restaurants here reopened for indoor dining with reduced capacity (which was reportedly rapidly filled by willing customers). Around May or June to a large degree people in my area also seemed to resume near-normal levels of private stuff like dinner get-togethers with extended family or friends. Many of my extended family members got COVID at such a gathering around Christmas that my household “stubbornly” refused to attend. Another couple of my extended family took a flight to a wedding in July or August of last year, which just seemed ludicrous to me but not that far out of the cultural mainstream here.

What people “hated” was mainly stuff like bars and other businesses that actually closed, people like me who “stubbornly” refused to gather, events that actually cancelled, and having to wear masks and maintain distance (visible compliance measures).

My guess is that most people who are told to quarantine but not given specific help to do it and monitored for compliance (which doesn’t happen here) will do it badly or not at all rather than do it but “hate it”.

23

Kinda a tangent, but I think I have top-tier quarantine skills and capabilities if I actually need to quarantine. I’ve never exposed them to outside criticism though, so maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Long before the pandemic we bought a motorhome. We also created on-site utility hookups for water, sewer, power, and internet for it while parked. Which, BTW, I have no idea why most RV owners don’t do cuz it seriously increases the utility of owning an RV. Company coming that’d be better to have on-site than in a hotel? It’s a guest house. Something major like the AC breaks in the main house? It’s a spare house till whatever broke gets fixed. When the pandemic hit we also evaluated its suitability for quarantine within the household. Idea being that if anyone in the house gets sick with anything they think might be COVID they could instantly move to the motorhome.

We didn’t design / buy it for that purpose at all but I was instantly impressed when thinking about it for quarantine.

  • No shared inside walls or doors with the main house
  • Air systems heating and cooling that are completely isolated from the main house
  • Full refrigeration / food storage, cooking, bathroom/toilet & washing, and sleeping facilities not shared with the main house
  • Comfortable for weeks at a time
  • Existing setups for computers for working & entertainment
  • Everyone keeps basic stocks of clothing, + non-perishable food & toiletries in there at all times
  • A negative pressure ventilation system! Roof vents that run off the 12-volt power side are designed to exhaust hot air out the top with the windows / screen door open. On the roof the exhaust is directed towards the back outside, which also happens to be away from the main house because of the way we park it. If most of the windows & main door are closed, outside air rushes in if any door or window crack does open

We also have 2-way radios for immediate no-contact communication, or can use internet stuff for video / monitoring if needed.

Due to the layout of the motorhome it’s possible to pull a curtain across the front cab area, turn on the exhaust fans to generate negative pressure, and then the sick person goes to the bedroom in the very back and closes its door (a regular, house-like door that’s kinda rare in motorhomes but one reason why we bought this particular one) and be 20+ feet, two barriers, and negative pressure away from the front. Then a non-sick person wearing PPE (of which we have a full complement) can open a front cab door, outside air rushes in while it’s open and they can leave supplies and/or remove trash or laundry as needed.

Should the sick person become ill enough to need hospital services, the utilities can be unhooked and then the whole thing driven to a hospital parking lot. When the engine is running there is also the capacity to generate positive pressure in the cab by turning on the normal (car-like) vents while also maintaining the negative pressure fans in the back, 2 barriers, and 20+ feet of distance between the sick person and the driver. And if the hospital is full at least you got a bed in the parking lot until one opens up inside.

This all seems, like, really freaking good and effective to me as a quarantine. Most people think they’re good if they have a separate bedroom for the sick person and try to wipe down the bathroom after the sick person uses it.

The main downside of this quarantine that I’m aware of is if more than one person gets sick at the same time, there’s no way for us to isolate them from each other. The motorhome is much closer quarters than the main house. So if one has COVID and one has something else, the risk they could infect each other is very high. Also if one needs to go to the hospital all sick people end up going at least as far as the hospital parking lot. But we think the risk of this situation actually happening is acceptably low.

Another downside is that if the majority of the house becomes sick (3 out of 4) we don’t know a good way to safely transition the quarantine from the motorhome back to the main house and the well person to the motorhome without risking infecting the last well person. There are also only two bed slots in the very back so if 3 people are sick then we can no longer maintain 20+ feet of separation from the well person when moving material in/out or driving. 3 out of 4 simultaneously sick is already a pretty bad and, we hope, unlikely situation to persist for long.

But really I think where I’m lacking isn’t with my quarantine protocol at all, but with symptom response protocol. If I implement this quarantine at any symptom, it’ll be unnecessarily disruptive and annoying. But if I wait to quarantine until I have a reasonable suspicion the symptoms are viral rather than allergy/headache (again, ~1 day after onset), the risk of infecting other household members is high. I don’t have a good answer to that dilemma.

24

You and I live in pretty different areas & have different social circles. I would agree that the people I had personal knowledge of were not 100% following the rules the whole time, but the kinds of rule-breaking I personally know of was different than your examples.

At Christmas, the rule was that you were supposed to spend it with only your immediate household, with some exceptions. (E.g., people who lived alone were allowed to spend Christmas with one other household. Grandparents who provided essential childcare to their grandchildren were allowed to spend Christmas with the family - otherwise the could not, unless the grandparent lived alone.)

I know of many people who broke that rule, but the types of rule breaking were things like:

A parent who lived alone saw both of her adult children at Christmas, even though she was only technically allowed to see one. Most people I talked to thought that was OK, and the rule went too far in not allowing this.

Someone I know had a Christmas gathering which included four different households, with eight total people. One of the families had divorced parents who lived apart - they would have been allowed to spend Christmas together under the rules as two households, since the children lived with the parents and went back & forth. But they also joined up with another small family (who wasn’t related to them), and also one of the older children had their boyfriend/girlfriend from another household join. This one is probably the “worst” example that I had knowledge of, out of the people I know personally. Most of the people I talked to thought they shouldn’t have done that, and that it was this kind of rule-breaking that was going to keep covid spreading.

Outside of Christmas stuff, I knew of lots people who would occasionally meet up in parks with a single friend, with masks on, staying 6 ft apart (or trying to - I doubt they did the whole time), even though you weren’t allowed to mix with other households at all at the time. Or who would drop things off at their friend’s houses - e.g., people would often offer to get groceries for people so they didn’t have to make a trip - and then during the drop of time they would stand near the door and chat for a while (again, with masks on, and trying to stay 6 feet apart). The drop-offs were allowed, but you weren’t supposed to use it as an excuse to socialize.

For the most part, most of the people I knew of would do a small number of those kinds of outdoor meetups, but they didn’t actually go inside of other people’s houses or have gatherings with multiple people or families.

I know of someone with a young child, and their kid went at least 6 months where they only ever saw another child in person two times, both times during a drop off like I talked about above, where they stayed outside the whole time, and the parents tried to keep the kids from actually getting close to each other.

And, for the most part, I knew a lot of people who did some stuff like this themselves, but were very harsh & judgemental about other people breaking the rules in similar (but different) ways. It was not socially accepted. I’m sure I know people who did worse, but they just knew to keep quite about it if they were meeting up with people inside.

Oh, and I also know a lot of kids who have not been in any group activities, school, classes, etc, since March of 2020. I also know families who sent their kids back to school and/or resumed doing group activities (with precautions in place) when they started up again in around Sept 2020. But even the ones who are doing school and classes have a lot of differences in their lives, can’t have friends over to their house (or some can have one that their family is close with), can’t have sleepovers, can’t just play in groups together like they used to.

So for most of the people I know, covid has had a major impact on them. Many people went over a year without seeing their extended family and just started seeing them again after vaccination. (And also I know many who still haven’t been able to see them, because seeing them would require travel, which they still aren’t comfortable doing.) And some people did continue seeing their family more than they were allowed to, but still in limited amounts, and trying to be careful about it.

So for a lot of those people, who are just starting to be able to get back to their lives, the idea of quarantining again - even if they weren’t 100% following the rules - is pretty terrible.

25

A few of the lefty atheists I know participated in BLM protests claiming it was a moral imperative, but then were super harshly judgemental of people doing other social stuff they considered moral like church. Other than that I don’t remember much hypocrisy on the pro-isolation side.

On the other side some people did stuff themselves and made no comment about others. But plenty of people did stuff themselves and were pretty judgemental about other people not doing similar stuff.

I heard/read normal people (not government, big corporations, or mainstream media) say stuff like stop living in fear, 99% survival rate, stop being paranoid, masks don’t work, virus gonna virus, etc. with much higher frequency than I heard people say stuff supportive of staying home and wearing masks.

My impression could be biased though because it was mostly reading people’s social media feeds / Nextdoor (neighborhood based social media) + some talk radio callers, with only a few 1-1 phone chats with family, friends, and work colleagues that covered the topic.

26

That is pretty much opposite of my experience. I did hear stuff from both of those sides, but the majority of the stuff I heard was on the pro-mask and pro-staying home side. The anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-social distancing side has been judged pretty harshly and I’ve actually seen quite a lot of hate towards it. I actually know someone who lost several friends because he openly questioned things like the seriousness of covid, mask mandates, social isolation rules, and the covid vaccine.

I know that my own impression is biased based on my area. I am in a very leftwing area, and because of that have a very leftwing extended social circle. A lot of them are very intolerant towards right wing views and people who believe in them. I live in an area where, for example, I don’t think it would be safe to go outside in a MAGA hat. I think you probably wouldn’t end up physically injured (though, honestly, I’m not sure), but you would likely be accosted, yelled at, intimidated, have drinks thrown at you, etc. And you might get the hat taken from you & thrown or stomped on.

I have lived in more rightwing areas before, and have friends from those areas too. One thing that I have noticed is that both sides don’t seem to fully understand that the other side exists, and what they are like. They both take their own views for granted, and think that other reasonable people would agree with them. They have some caricatured idea of what the other side is like, but if they meet someone who seems to be reasonable, intelligent (in whatever way they measure that), “normal”, etc, then they will assume that person agrees with them.

I have also read people online claiming that real things that I have seen & heard real people do are just caricatures made up to demonize the other side, and no one is really like that.

27

Btw, I don’t mean this applies to all their views. They do understand that other people disagree with them in lots of ways. But there are particular parts of their views that they don’t realize that any other reasonable-seeming person might disagree with.

For example, I have seen Christians shocked that someone who seems nice, friendly, giving, caring, etc was an atheist. And a lot of the left seems to believe that all Trump supporters are overtly racist, homophobic rednecks.

28

https://www.tiktok.com/@socialistlyawkward/video/6999351837417655557

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https://www.tiktok.com/@hannahlee_yoder/video/6999624278425505030

30

I think buying cars should be considered essential, and should not have been forcefully shut down. People get into accidents or have their cars break down, and they need to replace them. Doctors and nurses need to drive their cars to work, people need their cars to get groceries and other essential supplies, people need cars to get to health care appointments, etc. Especially during the pandemic, where transit, taxis, etc were all less safe.

There could be similar arguments for building supplies & hardware. People need to be able to fix structural issues, leaks, etc, even during a pandemic.

And even house buying - there are people that moved during the pandemic, and they needed to be able to figure out somewhere to live. So you need to either shop for a house to buy or a place to rent. I don’t think it is “safer” to force people into renting over buying.

During the beginning of the pandemic (before we knew the full scale of it or had much research about how covid spreads or how to treat it), and during the worst parts of the pandemic in any local area, I think that people should have voluntarily stayed home and tried to make only “essential” trips and purchases. And I think a lot of businesses should have closed. But I don’t think that the rules governing which items were essential to purchase, and limited purchases were good. In some places, they had stores open with certain aisles shut down, which just seems silly and not helpful or useful. I think rules like closing gyms and indoor dining made sense.

It’s problematic for the government to decide which items are essential. There are lots of items that are essential in some situations, but not in others. Like, you can go clothing shopping if you already have a lot of clothes you can wear, and that’s not essential. But there are also lots of situations where clothing is essential, e.g., you have a new baby or young child who is growing quickly, you have a house fire, theft, or flood that leaves you without clothing, you lose or gain a lot of weight and no longer fit your clothes, some of your essential clothes (e.g., your work clothes) get ruined and need to be replaced.

During the major shut down phase of the pandemic where I lived, a lot of smaller stores remained open for online or phone orders & curbside pickup, but were not open for people to come inside. Or you could come inside if your purchase required it, but you had to arrange that ahead and you would be the only one in the store. And then when things opened up a bit more, a lot of smaller stores were open with a policy of only 1 or 2 customers allowed in the store at a time, either by appointment, or they had to line up outside in a socially distanced way. I think those kinds of rules made more sense than the government just fully shutting down purchases and trying to decide which things were essential (which they largely did a very bad job of in the places I saw that they did that).

31

Ya. I know lots of people around here who didn’t even try to limit leaving the house to essential trips, didn’t order online, didn’t even do curbside pickup unless it was their only option. Some people even shopped more than usual because other activities they normally did were shut down.

Another thing that annoyed me was Trader Joe’s around here refused to do delivery or curbside pickup at all - even for people like me who weren’t willing to come in the store. Literally every other store we wanted to buy from allowed us to purchase without going in, and almost everything was deliverable so we didn’t even leave the house. Even the tiny local coffee roaster we get beans from allowed us to order from their web site and get them delivered through the (especially good-smelling) mail.

We found other places to source the kind of things we had been buying at TJ’s before the pandemic. TJ’s excuse was the importance of the “shopping experience” or something like that. Even though I will go in stores now that I’m vaccinated, I refuse to shop at TJ’s & don’t know when/if I ever will again. But the fact that TJ’s didn’t go out of business with such a boneheaded policy tells me something important about how many of / how well people in my area “quarantined”. I don’t know if TJ’s policy of no delivery / curbside was just my state or all over, but if it was all over it’s reason to suspect any area they have locations they didn’t shut down. It’s hard to keep a store running for a year if a good portion of the normal customer base suddenly stops buying like we did. Maybe they got money from the Government though.

32

Trader Joe’s is strongly against delivery. They even ended some delivery they used to do in NYC. It’s like, against their corporate ethos or something.

Sloan then tag-teams back in. “Creating an online shopping system for curbside pickup or the infrastructure for delivery, it’s a massive undertaking,” he explains. “It’s something that takes months or years to plan, build and implement and it requires tremendous resources. Well, at Trader Joe’s, the reality is that over the last couple of decades we’ve invested those resources in our people rather than build an infrastructure that eliminates the need for people.”

Pretty dumb reply imho. 1) a delivery infrastructure would involve people, and 2) the customers are people and would benefit.

I used to go to Trader Joe’s occasionally. But delivery has been getting more and more convenient and my going there was trailing off even before covid. Since covid, I’ve been there twice. I’d get stuff from them WAY WAY more if they did delivery. But it’s against their strategy/vision so idk if they ever will.

33

This reminded me that there is one delivery service that will deliver from TJ’s (Dumpling)

I looked into it once but the delivery fees seemed really high, which the review mentions as a downside.

34

Right. It’s not that hard to build a web site and partner with an existing delivery infrastructure if that’s what you want. Or at least mail non-perishables (of which there are lots at TJ’s).

I wasn’t aware of them before getting vaccinated or I might’ve tried despite the expense. I definitely was more willing to pay even fairly expensive charges for delivery than before the pandemic.

BTW I gave serious thought to whether shopping & delivery service just shifted COVID risk or actually reduced it. My thought was:

  • A smallish cadre of regular delivery shoppers in a store presents much less sequential spread risk than a large and continuously variable stream of ordinary customers, both to themselves and to other workers in the store like cashiers (so less COVID cases due to shopping)
  • Shopping & delivery service is done by mostly younger & healthier people who were less at risk for serious complications of COVID - so less impact from whatever COVID cases did arise as a result of shopping
  • Someone who makes it their job to shop and deliver has a better incentive to get really good at stuff like staying away from other shoppers, minimizing time in the store, and investigating and obtaining the best possible protections like masks. Not that I think many of them actually did get better masks, but the economics of it are more compelling for someone who shops 40 hours a week vs. someone who shops 2 hours a week.

Also, it seemed like a perfect job for lots of the people who worked in bars or restaurants or rideshare drivers or hotels or airlines etc. before the pandemic, lost their jobs and had zero hope of working from home. So their choice was delivery work or no work at all. No work at all is bad for its own reasons apart from COVID, and avoiding that while also avoiding COVID seemed like a worthy activity to support by paying up for it.

35

Ya it’s pretty dumb that you can’t even order e.g. cookie butter from them on a website but have to go through shady third party amazon sellers and risk getting near-expired stuff (or just get an equivalent product elsewhere, most likely). Even if they want to be store-centric, that seems excessive.

Costco is pretty store-centric in some ways but I have an almost entirely internet-based relationship with them (via normal shipping + instacart). That’s possible with Costco in a way it isn’t with Trader Joe’s.

36

I think that the general policies of the delivery companies help reduce the risk of spread, and the companies are in a position to enforce that stuff more. Trying to get Joe Blow to wear his mask when he comes into Safeway is a high-friction interaction for someone working at Safeway and might alienate the customer (or even worse if the customer gets super irate). But if an Instacart deliverer keeps not wearing their mask when doing deliveries and customers complain, Instacart can tell them to shape up or let them go.

37

Dumpling’s fees don’t seem that bad to me, at least not compared to Instacart. Instacart has lower delivery fees, but they have hidden markups and some of them are really high.

The comparison in that review actually seems really unfair. They say that Dumpling’s delivery fees “are a bit steep”, but they don’t mention the fact that Dumpling has a policy of always charging in store prices and giving you the actual receipt, whereas Instacart has hidden markups and will not provide customers with any transparency about those markups.

(Also, Dumpling’s system of allowing you to actually choose your own shopper has major benefits, especially if you are picky or have special dietary needs. You can purposely use a shopper with good reviews and/or who advertises themselves as having knowledge of your specific food restrictions. The shoppers have incentive to actually put effort into communicating with you and doing a good job with substitutions, since they want repeat customers. And as you build a relationship with the same shopper, they can get better at correctly predicting what kinds of substitutions you will want.)

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38

Some issues with your quarantine plan (this is not exhaustive, just some things I thought of):

  1. Sick people often need hands on help and care. Your quarantine plan just doesn’t allow for this. It’s a difficult problem in the first place. You would need 3 different self-contained units to be able to have someone care for the sick person without either staying with the sick person (and putting themselves at increased risk of getting sick), or staying with the healthy household members (and putting them at increased risk of getting sick).

  2. There isn’t a good way to deal with possible spread within the family before the quarantine is started. By the time someone has symptoms, they may have already passed the illness on to other household members. And they may have passed it on to only one other household member (this is especially likely if the first person to get sick is intimate with one of the household members but not the others, which is common). So if they go quarantine alone, and then it takes a few days for the other household member to realize they are also sick, in that time the second sick person could have also infected the other household members. You could have a policy of quarantine both partners/spouses at the first sign of either one being sick, but then you are putting the non-sick spouse at increased risk of getting sick - they might not have caught it, but by forcing them to quarantine together you are making it much more likely that they will catch it.

  3. I didn’t see any mention of laundry. Sick people often need laundry done. For example, it is common for people to need their bedsheets cleaned while they are sick. One possible solution would be to just throw out any bedsheets & comforters that get dirty, and replace them with new ones. You would need to have multiple sets available for this to work.

I think your quarantine plan would work better for a person who is not sick, e.g., someone who is returning from travel and quarantining as a precautionary measure before rejoining the household.

(Also, I don’t think that having a really good quarantine plan is currently necessary for your household, since you are all vaccinated and none of you are high risk.)

39

I think it allows for it similarly (but no better) than someone staying in a room: A well person can put on PPE, enter the quarantine area, and help the sick person.

The decision to do so would not be taken lightly. Since all members of my household are adults, we figured in most cases if someone is so sick they need hands-on help they probably need hospital care. Monitoring and encouragement can be done remotely.

Ya, this is what I’ve been referring to as symptom response. We never established an explicit plan - even a bad one. We put most of our pre-vaccine effort into avoiding anyone getting sick in the first place, and fortunately that worked. I’ll discuss post-vaccine below.

When travelling in the RV it’s normal for us to go 2 weeks between doing laundry. There’s enough clothes in there to do that as well as extra towels and linen. Also, I wrote:

If needed for extended quarantine, we planned to pass laundry out through the front cab area. There are laundry bags and a hamper in the RV itself which we normally use. Sick person would just leave it when full in the front seat of the cab, close the barriers, turn on the fans, go in the back, and radio a well person to pick it up. The well person would wear mask, gloves, apron, and face shield while picking up.

For much of the year here, the laundry can then be fully disinfected just by putting it in another car parked in the sun for a few hours. Internal temps in a sun-parked car routinely reach 140 degrees+ (verified with thermometer). Then it can be washed with normal laundry. In the winter or rare cloudy days it’d need to be washed separately with PPE worn, or just left for 14 days.

Ya, that’s the only way we’ve actually used it so far. One household member needed to do something indoors, in-person (but in town so no flights). No way to do remote (government security stuff). He wore a respirator the whole time, and passed smell fit test with it before leaving. But we still had it set up so when he came back he immediately went to the RV, showered, changed all clothes (& put them in a bag for later hot car for disinfection), then radioed in to the main house to discuss when to come back in. If he felt like he’d been exposed by respirator leak, people close, or other warning signs he was prepared to stay 2 weeks. All of us decided that wasn’t necessary based on his report of how things went, but we were prepared if we thought it was.

If I were starting out at the current status I wouldn’t put the kind of planning into quarantine that I originally did. But since I already have the plan I think if I need to quarantine I should execute it rather than some other, less effective plan.

This is also related to the reasoning I think you disagree with about how society should operate under vaccine abundance and over a year into the pandemic. It’s related to who I think should actually be in locations like the restaurants and stores I’d be avoiding under any reasonable quarantine plan. I think the only people who should be in restaurants and stores are people who, like me and my household members, are vaccinated and not high risk. If I was unvaccinated or high risk I would not go to such places - as I myself did not for over a year. Under current circumstances, I think if an unvaccinated or high risk person goes to a restaurant or store, I think the added risk to them is entirely their responsibility, not mine.

But if I have a positive COVID test or other reasonable suspicion I have COVID, then I think it does become my responsibility to effectively quarantine. That certainly includes not going to places like restaurants and stores, despite the fact that all the people there ought to be vaccinated and not high risk.

Further, I think that if I ought to protect the vaccinated, not-high-risk strangers in restaurants and stores from my known or reasonably suspected COVID, I should also protect my vaccinated, not-high-risk household members from the same risk as well as I reasonably can.

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One major reason I disagree with your attitude is that you would also require all household and close contacts of anyone high risk or who can’t be vaccinated to also quarantine in this way. This includes all parents of children under 12, as well as people with household members or other family that they want to see who are elderly or otherwise high risk. It could also be extended to things like teachers and health care workers.

I think that is an unreasonably large percentage of the population to expect to be fully staying home and not working in any sort of job that deals with the public (especially now that the benefits are ending). It seems a lot more reasonable to just have other people wear masks in stores than to continue to have society & the economy shut down to that level.

One thing that you noted disagreement about is the effectiveness of cloth & surgical masks. I think that those masks are not great for individual protection in an area where no one else is wearing masks. But I think that they are reasonable as protection on a society-wide level if they are being widely used in inside areas. They do not provide 100% protection, but I think they provide enough protection to lower the incidence.

Another issue is that you seem to think that people who aren’t vaccinated are responsible for putting themselves at risk, therefore it is not your problem to protect them - it is their choice to take that risk. But I also have issues with that. The problem is that the unvaccinated aren’t just putting themselves at risk - they are putting everyone else at risk too, by continuing to get sick and fill up the hospitals in multiple different states. I believe universal indoor masking would have an impact on those numbers, which would be better for everyone, including low risk vaccinated people. It is a problem for everyone - vaccinated or not - if the hospitals in your area are so full of covid patients that they have to transfer people out of state because they don’t have enough beds.