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What Should You Do About Holiday Gatherings and Covid-19? - WIRED

What Should You Do About Holiday Gatherings and Covid-19? - WIRED

What Should You Do About Holiday Gatherings and Covid-19? - WIRED
Oct 28, 2020 3 mins, 4 secs

Find a way to speak comfortably about your concerns, she says, “because at the end of the day, while we're trying to protect ourselves, we're also trying to encourage our family members to protect themselves, too.”.

“The headline is that the things that you do to keep yourself safe in public from strangers apply to the family with whom you're gathering,” says Benjamin Singer, a critical care physician and pulmonologist at Northwestern Medicine.

“It's probably somewhere around five to seven days after you're exposed where your test is going to be positive, and then you start having symptoms,” says Singer.

“I think 6 feet is still a reasonable thing, with the caveat that it's not a guarantee,” says Singer.

Singer says there’s just no guaranteed way to avoid all of these respiratory particles at an indoor holiday celebration.

For that reason, he says, “the blanket recommendation is: Avoid gathering indoors.”.

“While that sounds plausible, we just don't have evidence that that really happens,” says Singer.

Faced with the prospect of a holiday meal with so many restrictions and unknowns, some members of your family may decide that gathering is just not worth it?

That’s an emotional minefield, especially if other family members do not agree, but it’s not impossible to navigate.

“I think the first biggest thing is try not to judge one another,” says Barbara Young, a licensed marriage and family therapist, “and then at the same time doing what you need to do.

This isn’t a perfectly neat binary, to be sure, but some members of the family may be more lax about Covid-19, while others are more freaked out?

Young says they should try to find common ground around the holidays.

“I think people really need to sit with themselves and be like: What am I actually comfortable with?” says Young.

Ideally, your family members can all agree on guidelines ahead of time, so you’re not left hashing it out in the moment while losing patience with one another.

Sometimes an agreement on what will make for a relatively safe holiday gathering just won’t be possible, and that’s fine, she says.

“If you're in a situation where you have done all of these things,” says Pederson, “you've reassured your family that you care about them, you have shared your concerns, you have brought up the safety guidelines—and you have family members who are still refusing to follow the health care guidelines that are put forth by health care institutions—then I think that's the point where it's OK to sit out this year's Thanksgiving.

Many will have been physically separated from their family for all of that time.

But, says Pederson, “This is not going to be one of those automatic holidays, where you're just setting dinner times and going to your favorite grocery store to get your turkey package.” The coronavirus disruption cares not about our traditions.

Because what do you want to do when you're going through a hard time for several months at a time?” Pederson continues.

“You want to gather with family, you want to do those things that you're used to doing, those traditions that kind of help us reset.”.

“Another way is to just look at it really creatively: If we had the opportunity here this year to do new traditions to creatively think out of the box, what would we do?” says Young.

“You know, look at that as a time to just explore something completely new and different.”.

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