Avoiding a party this holiday season could mean you can safely attend one next year.<\/p>\n
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For many, a significant period of time has passed since they’ve seen family and loved ones. The upcoming\u00a0holiday season\u00a0poses a complex scenario.<\/p>\n
\u201cParticularly with the\u00a0[Pfizer] vaccine news, we\u2019re probably trying to look to get through another six to eight months and then it\u2019s highly likely the next Thanksgiving will be fine,\u201d said\u00a0Robert Wachter<\/a>, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. \u201cSo you really need to weigh the benefits of doing these things against the small but real possibility that you\u2019ll get sick, and depending on your age and comorbidities, the small possibility that you could die from it.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what the experts said they\u2019re planning this holiday season when asked:<\/strong> Are you traveling for the holidays? If so, how? By plane or car?<\/p>\n WACHTER:<\/b>\u00a0No and no. I think it\u2019s a scary time and enough of my family is here in San Francisco that we\u2019ve decided to hunker down, but the chances of catching COVID from a single flight is low. The best estimate is about 1 in 5,000, but that varies depending on the probability of people sitting near you having the virus \u2014 so as there\u2019s more of a surge nationally, that probability goes up.<\/p>\n GEORGES C. BENJAMIN<\/b><\/a>, executive director of the American Public Health Association:<\/b>\u00a0We\u2019re not traveling; we\u2019re going to stay home for Thanksgiving, for sure. It is possible that my kids who live locally \u2014 my daughter and her husband, who have been living in our bubble \u2014 might join us. We\u2019re all figuring out how we can maintain our bubble. We\u2019re linked and isolated separately. My wife helps with her kids\u2019 homeschooling. Otherwise we\u2019re all working from home and the kids are doing homeschooling.<\/p>\n AARON GLATT<\/b><\/a>, doctor at New York\u2019s Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA):<\/b>\u00a0I think travel is safe. I work in a hospital essentially full-time so I don\u2019t have the luxury, but I would love to travel. The traveling part isn\u2019t a real danger. If you\u2019re going to an area that\u2019s a high-incident area, that\u2019s a concern. Travel itself is fine. Traveling by car poses minimal risk if the people you travel with are all your family. If you stop at a hotel and it\u2019s sensibly cleaned and you\u2019re not eating in inappropriate settings and if you\u2019re masking and distancing, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a problem. Probably planes are nowhere near as risky as we originally thought, and if you\u2019re masked and distanced and it\u2019s a relatively short flight, you\u2019re probably fine.<\/p>\n