Social
media is flooded with frustrated comments from people complaining that the government is trying to dictate how Americans are allowed to spend their Thanksgiving holiday. They are clearly frustrated -- but they are mistaken: The reality is that exhausted health care workers, public health officials and public administrators are at wits' end as they call for personal action to stop the spread of Covid-19 in the absence of federal political will. The US has already seen more than 12.4 million cases and 259,000 deaths. Something must change because this trajectory is unsustainable.
But for those who are used to getting together with family members and friends -- basically merging several households for the day -- the idea that Thanksgiving, like almost everything else in this cursed year, should be different, is too much to bear.
It started with warnings from Dr Anthony Fauci that people should "bite the bullet" and cancel plans for mixing households at Thanksgiving. This recommendation was given on October 14, at a time when Covid-19 cases were on the rise in the US, with tens of thousands of new cases daily. Since then, the numbers have risen yet higher with new daily cases topping 185,000 last week.
Now, countless public health officials have backed up Fauci's urgent Thanksgiving prescription. I wholeheartedly agree. However, I recognize that many will not heed this advice and will still choose to gather. For those families, it is important to take precautionary steps to minimize the risk of viral spread as much as possible.
I will explain these in a moment, but first let me explain why we shouldn't gather and why I'm taking an alternative approach to Thanksgiving.
We are now at a critical point in the trajectory of the pandemic in the US. When infections in the local community escalate, the typical response is for an increasing number of people to voluntarily modify their behavior and shift toward lower risk activities. At the same time, local and state governments often begin to enact stricter mitigation measures. Together, these two factors can bend the infection curve and curb the outbreak.
Throughout this pandemic we have seen waves of infection. First the states in the northern cities crested and fell, then the southern states, followed by small towns, many of which were in the Midwest. As each area flared with infections, resources from around the nation -- including doctors and nurses -- flooded to those areas to assist the sick. But now infections are rising everywhere in the country, beds in hospitals are filling up rapidly, and the health care workforce is exhausted and depleted. Doctors and nurses from one area of the country simply cannot travel to another part of the country to assist because they are needed where they live.
Additionally, over the course of the pandemic, we have seen this virus spread in close quarters: in nursing homes, hospitals, social gatherings and households. In Massachusetts 86% of the new infections associated with outbreak clusters occurred inside households. One person would get infected and come home and infect their family.
