5 experts weigh in on pandemic travel risks
Doc urges viewers to reconsider their ideas about singer
How do you measure the risks of pandemic travel, and when will the time be right to go again?
We asked five infectious disease experts. The first thing we must do, they agreed, is stay close to home for at least several more months, get vaccinated and watch virus transmission and ICU numbers closely. Putting down the pandemic, they said, will depend on how faithfully we use masks, keep our distance and wash our hands — habits that will remain vital as authorities strive to vaccinate 300 million or more Americans by summer.
“I will never get on an airplane again without a mask,” said Dr. Kimberly Shriner, an infectious disease specialist at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California.
“Now is not the time to be traveling. For leisure or business,” said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, a professor of infectious diseases at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston.
If you fly now, said
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli in Charleston, South Carolina, “you can almost guarantee that there are going to be people on the airplane with you who have COVID.”
These experts all are wary of new variants of the virus. None is flying now. But their perspectives vary.
Ostrosky, born in Mexico City, has a lot of family there. So when his grandmother died recently, he thought about making the trip south. Mexico is one of the few countries Americans can visit without a mandated quarantine.
But after much talk, he stayed put in the U.S. because of the pandemic. Before he resumes travel, he said, he’ll ask several questions.
What’s the positivity rate? “I would avoid traveling
to any place that has a positivity rate over 5%,” he said. Above that, “you dramatically increase your chances of exposure.”
How full and how capable are the hospitals? Scores of U.S. hospitals are at surge capacity, with shortages of ICU beds. Because most county governments report COVID-19 information daily, Ostrosky said, “it’s actually pretty easy” to find data. As for capability, any hospital with a Level 1 trauma center (the most comprehensive trauma care) would satisfy him, Ostrosky said. The American College of Surgeons maintains a database.
Does this destination require testing to enter or leave? Many travelers might hope for that, but “I just don’t want to get stuck somewhere,” Ostrosky said. “People can test positive for a long period of time without being infectious.”
This is now a factor in any flight to the U.S., including returning roundtrip flights. As of Jan. 26,
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires all air travelers to show a recent negative COVID-19 test result before they can board any flight heading to the U.S.
Shriner, who also is a tropical disease specialist, has been vacationing in Europe for years and has spent more than 20 years making regular visits to a medical project in Tanzania.
But at Huntington Hospital, ever since the holidays, “we’re just absolutely getting hammered with cases of people who traveled,” she said.
Outside the hospital, Shriner has done some driving around California but hasn’t flown since March. Like her colleagues, she believes that driving (especially if you bring food and avoid public toilets) is safer than flying and much safer than cruise ships (most of which are idle now).
Like Ostrosky, she wants to see a positivity rate of 5% or less at her departure
point and at her destination. For data, she recommends the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
Shriner likes the idea of airlines and destinations requiring negative test results or vaccination. Whether or not those are required, Shriner said, people should get vaccinated, wait at least four weeks (to allow resistance to strengthen) and consider their age and immunity history before making travel plans.
In darker moments, she said, she worries that “this could just go on for another year or two if people don’t widely accept the vaccine.” She also shared a recent nightmare: She was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland (which remains closed) surrounded by unmasked strangers.
On the brighter side, she’s hopeful that travel might be safe as soon as late summer or early fall. “But it is all dependent on human
behavior,” Shriner said, “and we know how unreliable that is.”
Kuppalli moved in August from the San Francisco Bay Area to Charleston, where she is an assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina. She grew up in the Bay Area and had planned to visit her parents there this month.
Then the numbers surged. “I decided not to travel,” she said in mid-January. “I haven’t left my house in the last four days.”
To assess risk, “you can’t look at one particular piece of information,” she said. “You have to look at the entire thing. I totally get that this is hard for everybody. But this is not the time to travel. We all need to be thinking not just about ourselves, but everybody.”
Before Dr. Nancy Binkin became a professor at the Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at
University of California, San Diego, she lived for 12 years in Italy, doing epidemiology training for the Italian National Institute of Health.
So when that country’s fatalities soared in the early weeks of the pandemic, followed by escalating U.S. numbers, “it put fear into me,” Binkin said. “I have not been out of San Diego County since March.”
One pandemic number she watches closely is the adjusted case rate. That count measures the seven-day average of daily new cases per 100,000 people ( jails and prisons excluded). Any number above seven per 100,000 puts a county in the state’s most dangerous category, the purple tier.
When it comes to flying, she worries about jet cabins and tiny bathrooms, but perhaps even more, she worries about the lines of people and gathering points at airports, she said.
“Would I feel comfortable going down to Mexico? No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
Dr. W. David Hardy, former director of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s infectious diseases division and adjunct clinical professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, has mixed feelings.
He’s angry about “rampant disregard for science” and inconsistent messaging under the Trump administration. But Hardy sees great hope in the vaccines.
When he was treating HIV patients during the grimmest years of the 1980s, Hardy recalled, there was no such cause for encouragement.
“To have a vaccine that prevents 90-95% of people from getting sick is amazing,” Hardy said. He suggests that the vaccines are “going to be the final answer,” especially if the vaccines thwart transmission of the virus.
For 13 years, nearly every aspect of Britney Spears’ life — including major financial, professional and medical decisions — has been controlled by her father, Jamie Spears, through a court-approved conservatorship.
Instituted after Spears’ public breakdown in 20072008, the legal arrangement is now older than Spears was when she debuted on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” It has endured even as Spears appeared to stabilize and mount an impressive comeback, releasing multiple albums, touring the world and performing 248 shows during a four-year residency in Las Vegas.
Since Spears abruptly canceled a second planned residency in early 2019, the legal arrangement — shrouded in mystery and a thicket of non-disclosure agreements — has increasingly raised questions. Why, many wonder, is someone so capable and productive not allowed to make her own decisions? Journalists have produced think pieces and investigative deep dives alike about the conservatorship, and her most devoted fans have mobilized on social media to #FreeBritney from what they believe are exploitative circumstances maintained against her wishes.
Now it’s the subject of a feature-length documentary from a team of journalists at the New York Times, which recently premiered on FX and FX on Hulu. Directed and produced by Samantha Stark, “Framing Britney Spears” charts Spears’ rise from plucky “Star Search” contestant to queen bee of “TRL,” as well as the high-profile
unraveling that turned her personal troubles into a national punchline and culminated in the controversial conservatorship.
Applying the rigor of a “Frontline” episode to a narrative that has been shaped by thinly sourced gossip and anonymous hearsay, “Framing Britney Spears” is also a pointed work of cultural criticism that might make some viewers feel guilty about idly gawking at pictures of Spears on Perez Hilton circa 2007.
By retelling her story from the vantage point of 2021, the documentary encourages viewers to reconsider their ideas about Spears, her chaotic tabloid persona and her fervently devoted fans.
New York Times senior story editor Liz Day, who works on the paper’s branded FX docuseries “The Weekly,” says she was drawn to making a film about Spears because, she
wondered, “How could the same person be able to perform at a very high level in Las Vegas as a superstar doing sold-out shows, making millions of dollars, but at the same time, we’re being told that she is so vulnerable and at-risk that she needs this very intense layer of protection?”
What makes Spears’ conservatorship unusual is that these legal arrangements are typically designed for older people, often with dementia, who are incapable of making informed decisions or physically taking care of themselves. There’s a Catch-22 for people who attempt to terminate a conservatorship, Day explains. “If you are not necessarily in total control of your day-to-day life, or your finances, how do you prove that you can be in control of your finances and your day-to-day life?”
The producers of “Framing Britney Spears”
reached out to the pop star, her family, their lawyers and other members of her inner circle, but were turned down (or met with silence). “It was a real ethical quandary trying to figure out how to do this and not participate in what everyone has done in the past, which is make all these assumptions about (Spears),” says Stark.
A breakthrough came when Felicia Culotta, who performed an unusual hybrid role as the singer’s friend, assistant and travel companion in the pre-conservatorship era, agreed to talk about Spears for the first time in years, providing emotional insight.
Another pivotal interview came from Adam Streisand, the attorney Spears tried to hire to represent her in the initial conservatorship proceedings in 2008. Streisand says that Spears specifically did not want her father to be in charge of her
conservatorship.
“Framing Britney Spears” is the latest project to reconsider women once ridiculed and reviled because of their role in salacious scandals. It asks us to ponder our collective complicity in the mockery and sexist criticism to which Spears has been subjected.
“I had made an assumption as a young person that she wasn’t in control of her image — that she was a puppet who let other people sexualize her and she didn’t know what was happening,” Stark says. “But from all accounts of people that we’ve talked to, she knew what she was doing. She was discovering her (sexuality) and letting us see that. And that vulnerability led to all this ridicule and shame. And it wasn’t from her millions of fans who are often her age. It was from adults.”
Once the butt of jokes, Spears’ most impassioned followers have coalesced into a surprisingly potent movement.
“Framing Britney Spears” features several prominent #FreeBritney supporters, including LA comedians Tess Barker and Barbara Gray. Their podcast, “Britney’s Gram,” once dedicated to playfully dissecting the singer’s Instagram account, helped the #FreeBritney movement gain momentum. In April 2019, the podcasters shared a voicemail they had received from an anonymous tipster claiming to be a paralegal involved in Spears’ conservatorship and expressing grave concerns about the singer’s well-being.
Since then, supporters have regularly picketed at court proceedings and continue to parse Spears’ Instagram posts, looking for coded messages with the intensity of intelligence analysts.
The #FreeBritney movement became a more central part of the documentary as Spears’ legal battle picked up last year. In a series of court filings, Spears began to actively fight her father’s role as her conservator. When her lawyer wrote that Spears “welcomes and appreciates the informed support of her many fans,” #FreeBritney loyalists celebrated.
In November, Spears won a small legal victory by having an outside company, Bessemer Trust, added as co-conservator of her estate. But her father retains partial control of her daily existence and Spears remains responsible for paying her lawyers, her conservator and her conservator’s lawyers — doling out more than $1 million in legal fees last year.
“As long as it keeps going, all those people are making money,” says Stark. “Do they always have her best interest in mind? It’s hard to tell.”
PARIS — From her bulletproof case in the Louvre Museum, Mona Lisa’s smile met an unfamiliar sight the other morning: emptiness. The gallery where throngs of visitors swarmed to ogle her day after day was a void, deserted under France’s latest coronavirus confinement.
Around the corner, the Winged Victory of Samothrace floated quietly above a marble staircase, majestic in the absence of selfie-sticks and tour groups. In the Louvre’s medieval basement, the Great Sphinx of Tanis loomed in the dark like a granite ghost from behind bars.
Yet out of the rare and monumental stillness, sounds of life were stirring in the Louvre’s great halls.
The rat-a-tat of a jackhammer echoed from a ceiling above the Sphinx’s head. Rap music thumped from the Bronze Room under Cy Twombly’s ceiling in the Sully Wing, near where workers were sawing parquet for a giant new floor. In Louis XIV’s former apartments, restorers in surgical masks climbed scaffolding to tamp gold leaf onto ornate moldings.
The world’s most visited museum — nearly 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse a grand refurbishment for when visitors return.
“For some projects, the lockdown has allowed us to do in five days what would have previously taken five weeks,” said Sébastien Allard, general curator and director of the Louvre’s paintings department.
Louvre lovers have had to settle for seeing masterpieces during the pandemic through virtual tours and the hashtags #LouvreChezVous and @MuseeLouvre. Millions of viewers got a spectacular fix this month from the Netflix hit series “Lupin,” in which actor Omar Sy, playing a gentleman thief, stars in action-filled scenes in the Louvre’s best-known galleries .
But virtual reality can hardly replace the real thing. Louvre officials are hoping the government will reopen cultural institutions to the public soon.
In the meantime, a small army of around 250 artisans has been working since France’s latest lockdown went into effect Oct. 30. Instead of waiting until Tuesdays — the sole day that the Louvre used to close — curators, restorers, conservators and other experts are pressing ahead five days a week to complete major renovations that had started before the pandemic and introduce new beautifications that they hope to finish by mid-February.
Some of the work is relatively simple, like dusting the frames of nearly 4,500 paintings. Some is herculean, like makeovers in the Egyptian antiquities
hall and the Sully Wing. Nearly 40,000 explanatory plaques in English and French are being hung next to art works.
Even before the pandemic, the Louvre was taking a hard look at crowd management because mass tourism had meant many galleries were choked with tour groups. While travel restrictions have slashed the number of visitors, the museum will limit entry to ticket holders with reservations when it reopens to meet health protocols.
Other changes are planned — such as new interactive experiences, including yoga sessions every half-hour on Wednesdays near JacquesLouis David and Peter Paul Rubens masterpieces, and workshops in which actors play scenes from famous tableaux right in front of
the canvas.
“It’s a callout to say the museum is living and that people have the right to do these things here,” said Marina-Pia Vitali, a deputy director of interpretation who oversees the projects.
When I walked the halls on a recent visit, I felt a thrill upon seeing the Venus de Milo rise from her pedestal — minus the glow of iPhones — and admired, at leisure, the drape of sheer fabric chiseled from unblemished marble.
In the cavernous Red Room — home to monumental French paintings including the coronation of Napoleon as emperor in Notre Dame, and the Raft of the Medusa, depicting gray-skinned souls just clinging to life — it felt uplifting not to be swept along by throngs.
The pandemic also has wreaked havoc with planning for special exhibits. The Louvre lends around 400 works a year to other museums and receives numerous loans for shows.
“It’s really complicated because all museums in the world are in the process of changing their planning,” Allard said.
As governments order new restrictions to contain a resurgence of the virus, special shows are being pushed back. A loan reserved for exhibits at several museums may get caught in confinements, making it tricky to deliver the promised artwork, he said.
Nearby, workers climbed a rolling scaffold to remove an enormous Anthony van Dyck painting of Venus asking Vulcan for arms. Destined for an exhibit in Madrid, the painting was whisked through the Dutch halls, past Johannes Vermeer’s Astronomer studying an astrolabe, before getting stuck in front of a small doorway.
The workers turned the painting on its side and slid it on pillows to the next gallery, where it would go on to be packaged and — pandemic restrictions permitting — sent on its way.
“COVID has been a force majeure,” said Allard, as a duo of Dutch paintings were hoisted to replace the van Dyck. “At the moment we have so many question marks — it’s hard to know what the situation will be in two, three or four months,” he said.
“But despite COVID, we continue to work as always,” Allard continued. “We must be ready to welcome back the public.”
As we’ve had to postpone our travels because of the pandemic, I believe a weekly dose of travel dreaming can be good medicine. Here’s one of my favorite European memories from Germany — a reminder of the fun that awaits us at the other end of this crisis.
In Europe’s tourist towns, the best social moments combust after a long day of work, and after the guests say good night. In an Irish pub in Galway after closing, the door is locked and the musicians play on. On the Italian Riviera, the dishes are washed, the anchovies are eaten, and the guitars come out. And in small-town German hotels, the family and the hired help stow their workplace hierarchy with their aprons and take out a special bottle of wine.
During many visits to Rothenburg, Germany’s ultimate medieval town, I’ve sat down hurriedly at the Golden Rose restaurant to update my guidebook listing, then dashed away. Tonight, I’ve decided to sit down and simply relax with the Favetta family. We gather around the Stammtisch: the table you’ll find in most German bars and restaurants reserved for family, staff, and regulars. (An invitation to the Stammtisch is a good life goal.) Except for our candlelit table, the once noisy restaurant is empty and dark.
Well into our second glass of wine, we indulge in the sport many in the tourist business enjoy: cultural puzzles. The daughter,
Henni, asks me, “Why can’t Americans eat with a knife? You cut things with your fork.”
I confess I know nothing about holding silverware. And just to hit a Yankee when he’s down, she adds, “And you people love to drink plain water — we call this water the American Champagne. But you never eat liver or blood sausage. The Japanese love those.”
I ask Henni if it’s not dangerous to generalize about other cultures.
She says, “Even deaf people generalize.”
When I ask how, she explains with the help of her hands. “In international sign language, ‘Germany’ is my finger pointing up from my head,” she says, making a fist-and-finger Prussian helmet. ‘France’ is
this wavy little mustache,” she continues, wiggling a finger across her upper lip. “And ‘Russia’ is the Cossack dancer.” Henni bounces on her chair and hooks her thumbs at her waist, while her index fingers do a jaunty little cancan dance.
“And what’s the sign for America?” I ask.
“The fat cat,” she says, propping up an imaginary big belly with her arms.
Her father, Rino, leans over to me. As if a magician sharing a secret, he holds his hand palm down in front of my face. Stretching his thumb high and out, he forms a small bay in the top of his hand. Peppering in a little snuff tobacco, he announces, “Snoof tobak.” With Henni’s help, Rino clarifies. Struggling with the word, he says, “anatomical
snuffbox,” and snorts. With a quick sniff, I try it, and it works.
As noses wiggle, I ask Henni if living in a tourist fantasy-town gets old.
“I will live and die in Rothenburg,” she answers. “Teenagers here dream of leaving Rothenburg. One by one they try the big city — Munich or Nürnberg — and they come home. Summer is action time. Winter is quiet. The tourists, they come like a big once-a-year flood. We Rothenburgers sit and wait for you to float by.”
“Like barnacles,” I add cheerfully.
Henni looks at me like I just burped. “People who live here have magic vision,” she says. “If we want to, we can see no tourists and only local people. Rothenburg is a village. We know everyone.”
Henni’s sister Fernanda bops in wearing fine new American high-top sneakers. Since she once had an American soldier for a boyfriend, her English is American. “Americans get fashion,” she says. “But your really fat women wear shorts. I saw the biggest people in my life in the States.”
As the family agrees, Henni says, “And they wear tight T-shirts!”
Rino empties his tall glass of beer, licks his foamy upper lip, and adds, “The big German women wear the Ein-Mann-Zelt.”
I look to Henni, who translates, “One-man tent.”
When I counter, “But fat German men have skinny legs,” the entire family laughs.
“Beer bellies,” Henni says. “German men say a man without a belly isn’t a man. A German saying is, ‘Better to have a big belly from drinking than a broken back from working.’ ”
The impromptu party continues as I learn that, even in the most touristy town in Germany, you can still make a genuine, cross-cultural connection. Sitting at the Stammtisch after hours, this conversation becomes my treasured souvenir.