Holiday Guard-letting and “Spreader Math”
With the Pfizer vaccine now being administered in the U.S. and other vaccines on the way, with Christmas so close it’s extremely tempting for folks to “cheat a little” on social gathering rules after almost a year of Covid, thinking that somehow the danger is past or that the short-term rewards outweigh the long-term risks. The truth is that most of these vaccines including Pfizer’s DON’T prevent the infection by/transmission of the novel coronavirus…they simply prevent the virus from developing into the COVID-19 disease in vaccinated individuals. For these vaccines it means that you will only be immune to getting the disease yourself, not to spreading the virus and potentially harming/killing unvaccinated people out in the world.
People in general don’t want to hear this, though. They want for all of this to be over. They want to have a “real Christmas”, which for most means being physically close with all manner of friends and family, usually consisting of multiple gatherings spanning several weeks involving close contact indoors, typically eating and drinking together all the while (i.e. no or compromised masking/distancing).
Unfortunately, this is a recipe for an unmitigated disaster of as-yet-unknown proportions when it comes to communicable diseases. The U.S. is still reeling and hospitals are full in the wake of the “Thanksgiving cheat” almost 3 weeks ago. Imagine how much more deadly our “Christmas cheat” will prove to be.
Another unfortunate phenomenon observed during the holidays is what I call spreader math. It’s similar to the exaggerated (up or down) answers you get when you ask a woman her weight, or ask a man how much he can bench press, for example. Spreader math is a way for people who violate guidelines to avoid being shamed for it. Here’s an example: your coworker, when recounting his weekend to you on a Monday, tells you he “had a couple of people over to visit, but we were out on the deck with masks the whole time, and there were only 5 of us from 2 households total.” In reality this spreader math translates to 9 people from 4 households together for an extended period of time…and what the coworker won’t tell you is the party moved indoors when people got cold, that everyone had to take off their masks to eat and drink which they were doing 85% of the time, and that there were lots of unmasked hugs and loud talking that only increased as the time/drinking progressed. These untold truths are how we are breaking records for new Covid cases and deaths almost every day now. These untold truths are why 2021 will be more dismal than 2020, not less, in spite of the existence of vaccines.
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