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Social Distancing While Getting Together

Intellectually, I know that the only correct answer to the question of "is it alright to hang out with someone outside of my household during a global pandemic?" is "nope, just stay home to keep yourself and others safe." Emotionally, however, there's really no right answer to that question.

My brother had a birthday recently and my parents naturally wanted to throw a little family party. While my partner and I have occasionally interacted with my parents recently and then even interacted with my brother for Father's Day after debating the decision for quite a while, this party would reintroduce two more people into our social circle; my grandmother and one of my uncles.

It can be a slippery slope to let people back into your physical vicinity these days. It's so easy to think "well my grandmother is already interacting with my parents, and I already interact with my parents, so what's the difference if I interact with my grandmother now?"

But there's still a bit of a barrier there, I think. There's still the potential that if I am an unknowing asymptomatic carrier of the virus and I only interact with my parents, there's a better chance that my grandmother won't become infected than if I interacted with her directly. The reason being that there's a chance that my parents will find out I'm infected (and therefor that they might be as well) before they interact with my grandmother, and if they don't find out in time there's the chance that the virus is not yet contagious from them when they do interact with her. There's probably more scientific ways of explaining this and even more reasons than those, but the bottom line is that it's safest to keep your social circle small right now.

Adding to the complication of the decision is that my uncle is inflicted with a struggle that, while I won't give details here, means that he sometimes disappears for a while and we don't really know where he goes. So not only are we a higher risk to my grandmother and him, but they're a higher risk to us.

The smart decision would be for us to politely decline the party invitation for the safety of all involved. The emotional decision we made was to tell everyone involved that we were going to maintain our distance from my grandmother and uncle for the duration of the party.
Fortunately my family is very understanding of our worries during this time and made no objections to our decision. My parents even went out of their way to set up the party so that everyone would have plenty of room to comfortably eat and converse at a safe distance from each other while outside so as to further decrease the chances of an infectious spread.

Did we do the right thing? Technically no, but I doubt I need to tell you just how hard it is to keep up this social isolation for so long.

Stay healthy and sane.
-Ryan
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