RETURN TO RULES?
Two top Houston doctors weigh in on safety of road-trip plans to visit family
The winter surge is worst in places where leaders didn’t maintain forceful containment efforts.
With the holidays upon us, people are playing a real-life game of Risk and calculating whether it’s safe to travel home and see their families.
I took my holiday road trip plans to two of Houston’s top doctors to hear their thoughts. (Full credit for the idea goes to Sarah Feldberg, the culture editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, who recently wrote a retrospective of her cross-country trip to see her parents with her husband and baby.)
Several states, counties and cities have issued advisories pleading with people to stay home for Thanksgiving, including Harris County. Even as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations spike, public health officials worry the worst is yet to come.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged people on
Thursday to stick to virtual or household-only celebrations for Thanksgiving to minimize the spread of the coronavirus.
Dr. James McDeavitt, senior vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Wesley Long, a clinical pathologist at
Houston Methodist Hospital, weighed in on what we were getting ourselves into — and if we should cancel our trip.
Q: Here is the holiday plan: if cases are no longer spiking, my boyfriend and I, along with our 60-pound dog, would drive across the Southwest to see our parents in California. We’re quarantining: we’re not seeing our quarantine “bubble” here in Houston, getting groceries via curbside pickup and venturing out only to walk our pup.
McDeavitt:
I think that’s safe. Those 14 days leading up, the closer you come to actually being quarantined, the better off you’ll be. If you’re trying to adhere to this, use delivery services. You get your stuff really quickly. If you can not come into contact with other people, that would be preferred.
Long: Everything you’ve described to me, I can’t see obvious holes. You would just need to stay inside the entire time and have things delivered to you. You probably have to fuel your vehicles at some point and walk the dog, but you can kind of avoid other people and can always wear masks to do that.
Q: We’re thinking of getting tested before we go — the molecular nose swab kind, not the rapid test that has produced both false positives and negatives. It seems like doctors are split on whether it’s a good idea to get tested. Should we?
McDeavitt:
I don’t think there’s a right answer to that question. I’ll give you my answer: if you were to quarantine strictly for 14 days and come into contact with no other people, then
I don’t think you necessarily need to be tested because you didn’t have a chance of being infected. But anything short of that, and the reality is that it probably won’t be strictly quarantine, I think it makes sense to get tested. Give yourself a good five to seven days prior to the trip.
Long: I worry about test-based strategies giving people a false sense of security. Even if you test negative the day that you arrive, then everything you proceed to do, right? If you get tested, everybody goes, “we all we don’t need masks, and let’s all hang out and celebrate indoors.” Then you’re running that risk the test is a false negative. To really be safe, you still need to take those precautions because that test just represents that singular moment in time. From that point, you could acquire the infection from somewhere else and proceed to transmit it.
The other issue is, are you traveling to an area where there are lower numbers of cases? Or are you traveling through an area with higher levels of spread and transmission? That may increase your risk as you travel through that area to get where you’re going.
Q: We’re taking a lot of top doctors’ recommendations to drive rather than fly. When it comes to gas stations and other pit stops, what should we do? We’re masking up, but paranoid others will not.
Long:
What I worry about with road trips is you could do everything right, and then you get in your car and you’ve got to go from point A to point B. If you have to stop and fuel in a really small town somewhere between here and California, it’s hard to predict what that environment may be like. It’s hard to know if they have a mask mandate in that county, and it seems like a lot of times the workers are protected, but a lot of customers may not be.
McDeavitt: I wouldn’t stop at Buc-ee’s because it’s too crowded, and that’s a big sacrifice because I love Buc-ee’s. When you go into these places that are crowded, maybe everybody’s not maintaining the same level of discipline. At a minimum, wear your mask.
If you wanted to be extra safe, if you were very concerned, I would try to get hold of an N-95 and a face shield for that environment where other people aren’t masking.
Q: The drive will take three days, which means booking two hotels along the way. One hotel looks promising because of its curbside check-in option; but other hotels received online reviews that say the staff aren’t great at wearing masks. What are your thoughts on hotel stays?
McDeavitt:
Early on in the pandemic, we thought there was a risk of transmission from touching an inanimate object and putting your hand to your face or mouth. To my knowledge, there has not been a documented case of transmission through that sort of contact.
It’s probably prudent to take some disinfectant wipes and wipe down quickly those things that people touch a lot: the doorknob to the room, the faucets on the bathtub and sink, probably the remote controls for the for the TV. I think that’s being almost overly cautious but you wouldn’t be worried at that point. I think you’d be safe.
The risk of acquiring this through a commercial heating and air conditioning system in a hotel is probably not zero, but I think it’s very, very small. And it doesn’t rise to the level that I would do anything special and take precautions to help protect myself.
Long: You can look online and find out what each hotel’s policies are for masks and social distancing, but you may find when you’re at the hotel they don’t have watchers on every floor to make sure that there’s a mask on when somebody leaves a room to go get ice. That’s the troubling part about it. You could do everything right here, but the second you leave to travel you enter these unknown situations.
Q: Assuming we end up going, what can we do to make visiting our families safer? What can they do? We both have family members who are older or have chronic conditions. We would be in town for two weeks.
McDeavitt:
If you’re able to follow the process pretty religiously, where you’re actually doing something that approaches quarantining for 14 days in advance, then I think you’re going to be pretty safe in your family bubble. But the principle is you enter the bubble and you’re here to stay. That means take Bananagrams with you, because you’re going to be playing board games. You’re not going to be running out to restaurants or seeing the sights.
My caveat is if you have people that are particularly at risk, there is no guarantee. I would still be careful around those people. So if you’re with someone who’s immunosuppressed, I’d still recommend that you pay attention to masking and distancing. Don’t hug, don’t come into physical contact. Unfortunately, that’s the safest way to protect them.
Long: You have to consider if by going, if that induces other people to go who you can’t be sure are going to do everything (to quarantine). That’s going to expose mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa to risk.
The other thing is it’s a little bit hard to forecast even if we’re talking a week, two weeks, three weeks from now. It seems many places around the country have increasing numbers, so it’s hard to know how bad it will be.
You have to make a conscious decision on if the risks are worth it and do what you can to mitigate the risk once you’re there. Once you’re there, it’s tempting to see old friends or do things. It’s just this year, unfortunately, we have to think about all the consequences.
Q: Am I now rethinking my trip, especially with the new CDC guidelines? A bit.
Long:
I can say that the safest thing this year is to stay home with the people in your household and Zoom relatives and friends.
McDeavitt: The CDC recommendations reflect the seriousness of the COVID-19 situation. Everyone staying home is obviously the safest option, but I doubt many of the 50 million expected travelers are going to change next week’s plans at this point.
My advice remains the same. One, celebrate with your household or two, have your gatherings with careful attention to masking, distancing and eating outside. Or, do the hard work of creating a family holiday bubble — it’s too late at this point for Thanksgiving.