Rigid binaries are rarely useful.

If your household collectively feels a strong need to take some risk over the holidays you can still, always, take steps to reduce harm.

Ventilation. Masks. Distance.
Shorten indoor visits. Be outside. Eat around the fire pit.Take walks.

My household is forgoing eating with others.

But if you are gathering- please don’t just “throw caution to the wind”.

We all have a risk budget, and we can blow it, or spend it on what feels most essential to us.

I got a standard mammogram the Friday before we went into lockdown.

I’d missed a full year and have breast cancer on both sides of my family.

I “spent” my risk budget to get the test. Some friends commented that they would have waited.

We are each negotiating our potential fears and losses and needs against an opposing set of fears, losses, and needs.

Whatever your decisions you can still choose to try to reduce harm by using as many additional precautions as possible within the scenario.

Be conscious that medical personnel are overwhelmed

Work to make any decision a safer one.

All or Nothing is the worst way to think of these decisions because too many people will choose “Nothing” right off the bat, and another large group will attempt some unsustainable “All” and then bust out with a “Nothing” binge.

These are continuum choices.

Whatever you or your family need or don’t - please ask yourself- mindful that there is almost nothing that is risk free - what can I do, how can I make this decision safer for all involved?

Put a fan in the window. Give everyone long underwear

And when you interact with others who have made different decisions- please be forthright about how you have spent your risk budget, so that they can calibrate their own.

It’s important that we understand everyone is taking some risk that feels intolerable to someone else.

Many learned this during the early AIDS crisis. Zero sexual contact was unsustainable. Zero regard for HIV was fatal.

All or Nothing didn’t work. Always thinking about how to make safer choices, to assess for ways to reduce harm no matter the risk - was the only way forward