(no subject)

cw: covid

I've had an annoying allergy thing this whole past week, the kind of thing that often hits me in the summer, though usually not this late in the summer. Itchy eyes, runny nose, scratchy throat, an overall unpleasant time. It feels like allergies and I wrote it off as allergies and resolved to suffer through it, but since we're in pandemic times I took a COVID PCR test as a just in case- Negative. I didn't think it was very likely to be COVID- no fever, none of the other most commonly listed symptoms, and also I'm vaccinated- but it's a relief anyway.



I'm curious in general how everyone is feeling about COVID risk assessment/management right now. Incidence of COVID in New Jersey remains low, but has crept up a bit in the past week. Vaccination rates are fairly high, though not high enough to stop the spread, and they are not growing much anymore- the vaccine is readily available and anyone who was going to get it has had opportunity for the past several months.

The medical evidence seems to say that I am well protected from the serious consequences of COVID, which feels like it ought to suggest that I should feel fine going about life more or less as I did before COVID. In practice, I am still avoiding eating indoors at restaurants and I am still masking anytime I go inside a public building, though I have stopped wearing a mask at work. Also I am not avoiding public buildings as much as I was before. Most of my still-limited social time with friends and family in person has been outdoors, still, but when we go inside one of our homes I don't feel the need to mask unless they want me to. This feels to me like a reasonable balance of moving back toward pre-COVID behavior while minimizing risks in ways that don't impose too much of a comfort penalty.

But I've seen a wide variety of discussions of risk assessment from friends on social media, so I'm just generally curious how you're assessing things. A vaccinated friend just posted that they had decided not to go to an outdoor renaissance fair because of concern about the Delta variant, and to my mind that seems needlessly risk averse given the low risk of outdoor transmission and the low risk to vaccinated people, but a) I don't judge people who make different risk decisions than me, risk decisions are personal and hard and b) maybe there's information they have that I don't, it's so hard to keep on top of all the latest information. And the situation is specific enough to regions that it's hard to look to national experts for guidance.

baranduin linked to an interesting Slate article about how to think about the risks right now, and apparently they came out of it with the conclusion "If you've stopped wearing masks indoors, get them back on."... Meanwhile I read the same article and came out of it thinking maybe I'm wearing my mask too much, maybe I'm fine going into a grocery store unmasked.

All of these things ought to be basically rational calculations, made difficult only by uncertainty in the data, but of course they're not, they're extremely emotional decisions about our safety, and also they're needlessly entangled with identity questions like am I a Republican or a Democrat.

I'm curious if there are any milestones you're considering, either timewise or casewise. Are you at "I'll be fine to start eating indoors in September once temperatures cool, but right now with the weather being so warm there's no real reason to insist on not eating outdoors?" Are you at "I need local cases to be below a certain threshold for a month before I relax my guard on public gatherings over a hundred people?" Are you planning to keep turtling until there's zero cases in your area?

There's no wrong answers, I'm just curious.