Short Wave - Safely Socializing In The Time Of 'Rona

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

Socializing is critical for mental and emotional health. You need it. We need it. But what's the safest way to socialize during a pandemic? We propose a few rules-of-thumb and suggestions to see you through, whether you're isolating at home or an essential worker on the job. Plus, check out Yuki Noguchi's reporting on cancer's deepening impacts during the pandemic.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody, I'm Maddie Safaya. And I'm Emily Kwong. And today we're going to dig into a topic you've probably already been exploring with your own friends and family, which is how to socialize safely during this pandemic. Yes. And don't get us wrong. I enjoyed my Zoom birthday party as much as the next person. But, you know, being around other people is key to emotional and mental help.

And there are some occasions when it's just really hard not to get together. Alexia Gaffney found herself in this exact situation while trying to plan her nephew's graduation. He got his associate's degree with honors during the pandemic. Her nephew, like Gaffney, is black. And he did all of that with all the stress and turmoil of everything that's happening in the world around him. COVID and, you know, racial inequality and protests and people fighting for our rights. He defied the odds, you know, and it's like, we're going to celebrate that. It's too important not to celebrate.

But planning that gathering, a backyard barbecue. It was such a big to do, you know, wipe down the faucets and the doorknob when you come out of the bathroom. Was a huge challenge with so many risks to weigh. Alexia spoke with our colleague Yuki Noguchi. When it was done, I was just freaking the hell out the whole time. Oh, my God. Were we okay? Did we stay far enough?

Did everybody wear their masks? Okay, people had masks. Some people took their mask down. You know, was there enough hand sanitizer? Like, it feels like insanity. Yeah. I'm feeling overwhelmed just listening to this right now. Yeah.

And some of Gaffney's family members are essential workers working for public transportation in New York City. There's no social distancing when you work for the MTA. You're going to work every day. You're the essential employees. everybody's talking about. Social distancing, the habit we've been getting reluctantly good at since March. I've seen you, Emily Kwong, one of my very favorite persons, maybe three times. Always outside, always with masks, always nervous.

The days of a laid-back barbecue or sharing popcorn at the movie theater have just evaporated. And we're lucky we can continue to socially distance while working, you and I, because we make this show remotely. Yeah. And, you know, a few weeks ago, we started talking about how there's all this guidance about how to socially distance. Things like, you know, use the internet to hang out, go to big outdoor parks. But there isn't a ton of guidance about how to socially come together, how to make social bubbles, that kind of stuff. Right. And we wanted to fix that. So today in the show, a shortwave guide to safe socialization.

A roundup of advice from public health experts we trust to help you spend time safely with love whether you've been isolating at home or you're an essential worker on the job. So before we talk about safe socializing, let's slap a huge disclaimer on this episode, which is so long as we're in the thick of this pandemic, all social interactions carry some risk. I'll always start from the place of saying what the safest thing to do is, which, you know, is, of course, I have zero social contact. Anybody that you have social contact with, your risk is going to go up, their risk is going to go up. Julia Marcus is an epidemiologist and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

She's written a lot about how the CDC's early advice for social distancing was rooted in kind of like this abstinence-based approach, telling people to stay home, not see each other at all, except for essential activities. And, you know, while this made sense at the very beginning, she argues it doesn't work for this long-term situation we're facing. Right. But what is a powerful public health tool in the long term is shifting to a harm reduction strategy, basically using the tools of science to determine which scenarios are lower risk and how to lower your risk even further when you do socialize. Right. And all the public health experts we spoke to for this episode said you need to ask yourself three questions before you socialize. One is what's going on with community spread in your area. Is it high? Is it low? Is it increasing? Is it? it decreasing? So basically, you want to know if you're in a hotspot, right? So you can check your local and state data. And this is a general rule. If there's 10 or more cases per 100,000 people, that means there is escalating community spread. And we've linked to a handy state-by-state tool for this in our episode notes. You can go check that out. Okay. Second question. What is your own and your household's vulnerability to the virus? And then the same question of the people you're going to be interacting with is that. somebody who's older, who has a condition that would make them more vulnerable. Or perhaps somebody in your household works in health care or other essential services,

which we'll talk more about later. So the third thing to ask yourself is, what is the risk of the activity you're thinking about engaging in? And if it's a social bubble where you're going to be having, you know, indoor, unmasked, non-distance interactions, then, you know, that's a consideration. Julia is absolutely right here. This virus, we know, thrives in proximity, in crowded indoor space, so you can lower your risk automatically by taking any social gathering outside. Picnics are my new favorite social activity, and it's great right now because the weather is, you know, is good.

This is Nahed Bedelia, an infectious disease specialist and medical director at Boston University School of Medicine. When she's doing clinical medicine, interacting with patients, she limits her social interactions to just people in her household, right? But when she's doing research, after isolating for two weeks, she'll start to broaden her circle and has created what's called a pod. There are people within my family that I have formed a pod around who I know their risk. They know my risk. And I'm able to spend time with them and take care of them and provide, you know, in the case of my parents, provide them support if they need me. Right. So this concept has been around in the pandemic for a while now.

pods or social bubbles. I've heard quarantine. Ooh, quarantine. That's my new favorite one, Kong. But yeah, basically, it's a small group of individuals you see outside of your household that you're willing to share more risk with than, let's say, people you might see once, you know, in a while outdoors, 10 feet away. These are people you see more often, or maybe you choose to see them inside. And it's a good idea, if possible, to get tested or really quarantine for two weeks before hanging out to try to make sure nobody in your bubble has COVID. And when we say small group, we really do mean small, because you're taking on your risk and theirs and the risk of whoever they may interact with. Most of our experts said less than five people outside of your household

would make the ideal pod. Carlos Castillo Salgado, a medical epidemiologist and professor, in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggested just two to three. The smaller the bubble is the less risk. And while the extrovert in me withered upon hearing this, it does make sense, right? The bigger your pod, the more people could be infected if a COVID-19 case develops in that group. Yeah, you want to reduce that harm when you're venturing out to make your pod. And this concept isn't really being touted by CDC. but, you know, health professionals in New Zealand, Canada, and some European countries have offered pod guidance as part of easing up lockdown restrictions.

New York City has recommended social bubbles to a core group of family and friends. And key to really making this work is good, clear communication. Here's Carlos again. They need to have an agreement in being very transparent and honest and compliant with the rules. because in medicine and in epidemiology, we call this adherence. Adherence in the medical world is this idea that you follow the treatment your doctor prescribed. And Carlos said, you know, adherence in the pod world is that you follow the rules set out by your pod, which means you need to have, you know, the talk.

Mm-hmm. Yep. The talk. The pod talk. He knows what I'm talking about. It's almost like asking for fidelity. And Julia, who comes from the world of sexual health, says these conversations might, even feel familiar. In some ways, it feels unprecedented to a lot of people, but I think we can draw and what we know from, yeah, the safer sex world and those conversations around STIs,

they happen best when they're non-judgmental and when they're open and when people feel like they can say, you know, they can disclose important information. If you form that pod relationship, you almost have to be empowered that if you find yourself in a situation where you do not feel safe, you feel comfortable in it to extricate yourself from that situation and from that pod. Which also means, of course, having the trust and the confidence to disclose that you were feeling sick or were perhaps exposed or maybe you hung out with people you hadn't talked about hanging out with before. Saying, you know, I actually, I went to a dinner party last night or, you know, here's a way that I created a leak in the bubble, you know. You got to have that transparency. You got to. Okay. So we talked about the three questions to ask yourself before socializing, how to build a healthy pod, which is going to be.

especially important as the weather gets colder and it's harder to be outside. The last thing we want to talk about is how this calculus is both the same and different for essential workers, right? Yeah, I mean, I have a few in my family and essential workers deserve a safe means to socialize while keeping their job. All of our experts said the responsibility is really on the employer to protect them. I think it's unfair for essential workers to be really despite all the burden that they're taking to then be told you actually cannot socialize, you know. And so the way that we make it safer for them is we have to invest whatever we can to make personal protective equipment and workplaces safer for them. The evidence shows that with good PPE, at least with healthcare workers, the rates

of transmission remain low. Also important is testing every two weeks ideally. Yeah, like actual surveillance testing to find out where the virus is, which, you know, is way more of an ideal than a reality in America right now. And in a lot of ways, our federal government has really failed to provide consistent protection for those on the job to make it safe for them to work, socialize, and keep community spread low. Yes, and it's really frustrating. In California, where Carlos, the medical epidemiologist we heard from earlier works, the Latinx population represents 59% of all COVID cases, in part because they are largely represented in essential service industries like construction, and transportation, a pattern we're seeing in states throughout the country, among black and

Latinx groups especially. And so it got me thinking, you know, as COVID-19 reveals the massive inequities in our health care system, it's also revealing inequities in leisure, right? And who gets to relax safely and easily? The paradox is that many of the more affluent individuals of population groups will have the ability to develop the social bubbles with less risk. Yeah, I mean, Emily, this was like the most frustrating part for me of working on this story. The lack of protection for essential workers by federal response, by employers, puts more responsibility on individuals, on private citizens to protect essential workers by wearing

masks and maintaining social distance. Right. It didn't have to be that way, but the good news is that we at least can do that. All of us, consumers and citizens, We can wear our masks anytime we step out the door. And especially in indoor spaces, whether they're required or not. And pressure workplaces to be safer. Emily Kwong, always inspiring.

Thank you for this. I appreciate you. Thanks for reporting the story with me, Maddie. Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, fact-checked by Emily Kwong, and edited by Viet Le. And special thanks to Yuki Noguchi, our stellar colleague who's reporting we featured at the top of this show. We'll post her full story in our show notes. I'm Maddie Safaya. And I'm Emily Kwong.

Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.