So I'm advising people to skip the big Thanksgiving, even though yes, most people who go to a big family Thanksgiving dinner will not die! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-no-1-thanksgiving-tip-dont-gather-this-year/2020/11/17/d3dd14e0-2902-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html

I think it's worth talking about how I came to that conclusion, even though I understand that turkey day is super important to a whole lot of people.

Basically, it boiled down to: when I described a "safe" dinner, everyone asked "But then, what's the point?"

People don't want to wave at their relatives from a comfortably distanced chair on the driveway while eating the food they brought in their own cooler.

(Though I actually bringing your own food is unnecessarily paranoid even for the immunocompromised; I've seen absolutely no evidence that hot food touched by someone else can give you covid.)

Masks are great, but they don't protect you, they protect others, and they do not protect others if you spend three days with them in a house with the windows closed, talking up a storm.

Handwashing/spraying everything down: fine to do as an add on. Not meaningful protection from how we now know it spreads.

Tests: great as an add-on. Failure rates are high enough that you're running a pretty substantial risk if you're in an area with high spread.

Quarantine in advance: Great if you are actually doing it. Everyone I know who is talking about quarantining is not actually planning to pull the kids out of school & stay out of stores for two weeks. Hilariously, I've seen multiple people planning to quarantine ... then travel.

What they mean is they're going to stop indoor restaurant dining, which, dude, have you seen the caseloads in places that are still allowing indoor restaurant dining? Why are you doing that?

To return to what I said up top: yes, I KNOW that if you are under 60, your death risk is quite low.

However.

Many people are not going to have their Thanksgivings with only Teh Youngs, a decision Scott Atlas defends by saying it might be their last Thanksgiving.

Indeed, especially if they listen to Scott Atlas.

And especially now. Because background caseloads make this decision way different than it was even a few months ago.

Basically, almost anywhere you are, your odds of catching it are higher than they were back then--and growing. This presents two problems.

First, if you have a big family holiday--five, six households, or more--the odds that one of the guests is infected has gone up. And Thanksgiving is a near perfect superspreader event: the main activity precludes masking, and you sit there face to face, talking for HOURS.

But second, the high caseloads increase the risk that if you get covid, you will die.

Treatment has improved a great deal over the summer. But that's moot if there aren't enough doctors, nurses, beds, or medicines.

The risk that one or more runs short increases with every new case.

Now, again, most people who get it will still survive--but the death rates can get pretty gnarly when hospitals collapse, even for those in late middle age.

Americans have some trouble grasping this, emotionally; they just cannot imagine what it is like to go to a hospital and know that there are treatments for what you have, but doctors can't give them to you because they're out of stuff or staff.

That's not going to happen everywhere. But we don't know where it will happen, and that would really suck--not just for covid patients, but for car accidents, heart attacks, etc.

Also, there are long term effects even on people with mild cases; we don't understand them, but they are probably more likely to affect relatively young people (because they're less likely to die). I don't have numbers on it; we just know it exists. That's also not a fun risk.

As Americans, we should try not to burden the system unduly at a time when it's facing a tidal wave of cases. And no, not like flu season. We're barely in flu season, and hospitals in some places are already full up.

Finally: we have vaccines coming. The cavalry is not just on it's way; we can hear the thundering hooves and see the dust.

It's one thing to say "We have to live our lives" if a vaccine is years away. Because it would suck to give up Thanksgiving and have everyone get it anyway.

But it would also really effing suck if you had a superspreader event, and Mom turned out to be in the unlucky 3% or 8% or 16% that doesn't make it--and then realize three months later that if you'd just waited a little longer, Mom would be getting her first shot.

In fact, waiting for the anniversary of Mom's death, or Dad's, or grandma's, or your diabetic husband's, might make Thanksgiving kind of unfun in years to come.

So to me, the right bet is to save Thanksgiving for years to come by keeping this one small, and if you're going to join, say, one other household, practicing rigorous quarantine, testing, and keeping the space well ventilated by cranking up the heat and opening all the windows.

Go ahead and yell at me, conservatives; you do you. But you know, it would't hurt to take a test and throw some windows open, just in case.