Thanksgiving is my family’s favorite holiday. My brother and I live far from home, and it’s the one weekend a year our family reliably gets together. However, this year there is a pandemic, and right now COVID prevalance is spiking all over the country. I really don’t want to bring home a deadly virus to my parents. I used the microCOVID calculator to figure out how risky my trip was, and was able to reduce my risk by 1000x. Even with these precautions, traveling right now is too risky for my family. We'll wait until prevalance dies down a bit.

If you have decided to travel anyway, here's what I found for making the holiday safer.

Key takeaways:

1. Travel safer, avoid flying if possible
2. Avoid indoor contact with others starting 10 days before the gathering
3. Encourage all guests to do the same
4. Do 1-3, even if you are also getting tested

Travel Safer

• Given that I’d be on a crowded plane, I’ve opted to buy better protection - N95/KN95 masks are 10x better than a cloth mask. I bought mine at Honest PPE Supply for about $3 a mask.
• If I could avoid flying I really should - a plane ride is about as risky as 12 weeks of grocery shopping (which is already one of the more dangerous activities!).
• Likewise, it would have been ideal for me to quarantine for 10 days after getting off the plane (to ensure I don’t pass on the virus if I get it on the plane). I don’t have a good place near my parents to do so.

Avoid Indoor Contact

• COVID spreads via exhaled particles; whenever someone is breathing in the same room as you, they could be transmitting the virus.
• Starting 14 days before my gathering:
  • I would avoid working in an indoor space with others. I note that I’m fortunate to have a job that allows this. If I were working a job that made me come in, I’d wear a KN95 mask during this period.
• Starting 10 days before my gathering:
  • I won't share air space with others - no indoor dining or in person shopping. I’ll shop ahead of time or use curbside pickup for essentials.
  • If I must go into a store, I’ll wear our KN95 mask.
  • I won't spend time indoors with friends - but I can still hang out with them outside.
  • I don’t have housemates, but if I did, I would try to avoid sharing air with them - I’ll use the kitchen at different times and run a HEPA Air Purifier in common spaces.

Encourage Family/Guests to do the Same

• Since my brother would also be coming, I’d need to talk to him about taking the same precautions as me. Keeping our parents safe is on both of us!
• We normally have friends over for Thanksgiving, but we won’t do that this year. Having a smaller gathering reduces how many people might bring COVID to dinner, and reduces how many people will be exposed if someone does show up with the virus.

Tests Don’t Replace Staying Safe

• Taking a test before seeing my parents isn’t the same as taking the above precautions - COVID tests give a snapshot of whether or not a person contracted the virus 5-8 days ago.
• Even if a test comes back negative, I might have contracted the virus after I took the test, so it only works if I’m careful starting 5 days before the test.

Again, following the above precautions, even without the extra ones, reduce the chance of my parents getting COVID by 1000x. But even with all that, I would be exposing my parents to a full 12 weeks of their risk budget. In the end, our family decided to give this year a pass. Hopefully we'll have a vaccine by next year and life can go back to normal.

If you're determined to travel, please, please, please consider adding the above precautions. If you're on the fence about flying this Thanksgiving, I strongly suggest sitting tight. The end of the pandemic is in sight, we just have to survive until then.

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Behind the Scenes: How I used microCOVID to Plan My Trip

Here’s the steps I took to assess what the risk level of my family gathering would be. The general precautions I outlined are great practice and should work for you, even if you don’t want to dive into the numbers. If calculating your exact risk and optimizing for your situation is something that excites you, read on!

Note: The microCOVID values reported here are a snapshot from November 14, 2020. Following the links on a different day may give different results if prevalence changes.

Note 2: Location matters! If you want to apply these to your own plans, be sure to change the location to where you are travelling from and to.

The Plane Ride

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A 3 hour plane from Denver while wearing a N95 mask costs 200 microCOVIDs.

Also, if risk to yourself and/or your housemates are something that you are concerned about, be sure to check the reverse flight; you might need to quarantine from your housemates to protect them when you return!

Transit to and from the Airport

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A taxi to the airport in Denver costs 20 microCOVIDs. The taxi from the airport in Maryland costs 4 microCOVIDs. I included rolling down the windows for the ride.

If public transit is an option for you, we note that many trains/subways are relatively safe, due to great air circulation. Busses do not have these filtration systems and are riskier than cars.

Either way, transit to the airport is relatively safe!

Behavior Before Travel

My normal routines include grocery shopping with an N95 mask (40 microCOVIDs) and seeing my partner who used microCOVID to manage her risk (100 microCOVIDs).

My brother also grocery shops (40 microCOVIDs), and his partner is a schoolteacher, and schools have been in-person (200,000 microCOVIDs) (there's some data that suggests her acutal risk is maybe 1/4 this, since she teachers young children, and young children are less likely to spread COVID - we don't have this research added to the calculator yet).

Quarantining

If we were to fly home today to see our parents, we have a total of over 200,600 microCOVIDs. Our parents would get 30% of this, or 60,000 microCOVIDs. As people over the age of 60, their weekly microCOVID budget is 20, so coming home would be 3000x their weekly budget or 60x their annual budget. That’s no good!

We need to reduce the chance of bringing home the virus. This is where quarantining comes in. We can avoid risky behavior for 14 days prior to seeing our parents, which gives us a chance to see if we actually got COVID (and not come in contact with our parents if we did).

There are a couple of durations of quarantine that get thrown around - the two I’ll talk about are 14 and 10.

• 14 days - catches 99.9% of cases
• 10 days - catches 95% of cases

Or in the context of microCOVID, a 10 day quarantine reduces your risk by 95%. A 14 day quarantine reduced your risk by 99.9%.

My brother’s partner, who currently has 200,000 microCOVIDs, needs to sit out the full 14 day quarantine (as a 10 day quarantine would bring her to 10,000). My brother and I only need a 10 day quarantine, as this will bring me from 140 to 7 and him from 40 to 2.

Of course, quarantining from a job is not always easy. For those who don’t have the option of working remotely or taking time off, there’s no easy answer. Consider what your options are and how much risk you’re willing to bring home.

There is also a choice of quarantining at home or at your destination; if we quarantine at home in Denver, all three of us still incur 200 microCOVIDs from the plane ride, which we’d bring home to our parents. To be maximally safe, we would instead quarantine in Maryland, after flying. However, doing this would require getting a hotel or other place to stay in Maryland where we wouldn’t be sharing air with our parents. It would probably be less comfortable than staying at either our homes or our parents’, but it would reduce our microCOVIDs by 190 a piece.

Putting it Together

With a quarantine at home and N95 masks on the plane, we still come home with about 800microCOVIDs. Our parents would record a “housemate” interaction with us, which gives them 240 microCOVIDs. Assuming they are otherwise being maximally safe, that is 12x their weekly budget of 20 microCOVIDs.

Our family considers this risk too dangerous, so we've opted not to get together.

Finally, here's some things that might make it safe enough if your situation is different from mine:

• Avoiding flying entirely - driving would sidestep the risk of flying.
• Wear a better mask on the plane. It's plausible that a P100 will provide 10x better protection than a N95. We don't have solid research that backs this, however. So it's up to you if you want to take bets on it.
• Find a way to quarantine near home after the flight for 10 days, reducing the chance of exposing parents to the risk of the flight by 95% (you still run the risk of getting COVID yourself, though).
• If you're lucky enough to be in a part of the country that's still warm, have dinner outside, which reduces the exposure by 20x.
• Wait. COVID prevalance was 100x lower for the summer. The risk of getting COVID from these activities is directly proportional to how much of the population has COVID. If you wait for rates to go back down again, you can have a safer Thanksgiving in the spring.

If one of those three works for your family, I'd say go for it. Otherwise, let's wait this out.