Experts: Green doesn’t mean return to pre-pandemic life
For months, Amy Moline has heard the same plea over and over again from her 81-year-old mother: “I can’t wait to come hug the kids.” With Allegheny County now firmly in the green phase, does that mean her wait is over?
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has set strict rules for many aspects of reopening, from how far apart seats need to be at a bar (6 feet) to the maximum number of people allowed at a concert (250) to whether restaurants can leave condiments on the table (no). But that still leaves individuals contemplating the COVID-19 calculus of everyday decisions, from a grandparent’s hug to a child’s birthday party to the menu at a barbecue. Just because the doors have opened, is it responsible to walk through them?
“There’s nothing black or white about it,” said Ms. Moline, 52, of Upper St. Clair. “Green is weird because my hairdresser called and said, ‘We’re opening up.’ OK, maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”
Infectious disease experts caution that the green phase does not mean that life is back to normal.
“The virus doesn’t know or care what kind of stage you’re
in,” said Thomas Walsh, an infectious disease doctor and director of the antimicrobial stewardship program at Allegheny Health Network. “It’s really critical that people — while you are allowed to be more social and not have stay-at-home orders — that you not go back to where you were in a pre-COVID-19 world. We still don’t have a vaccine or much in the way of therapeutics.”
Unlike when the pandemic started, and the Pennsylvania Department of Health put out firm guidelines such as a blanket “no play dates” post on Twitter, individuals must determine what degree of social distancing is best for them.
“There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all answer,” said John Williams, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. “Each person and family have to assess their own personal and family risk.”
Consider the play date. If a young child lives with a high-risk person like a grandparent, it’s not something that Dr. Williams would advise doing at this point. If the child and their parents are relatively young and in good health, “they may feel that it’s worth the risk to resume those more normal activities,” he said.
But within each activity, there are ways to mitigate risk. Play dates can be largely outside instead of inside. Children can wear masks or face shields. Each child could have his or her own bowl of Goldfish crackers instead of sticking germy hands into the same container.
Dr. Walsh has taken his three children miniature golfing several times since the new coronavirus arrived, he said. They bring masks in their pockets and put them on when they are close to other people. When they are on a hole by themselves, they take the masks off.
Similarly, when Dr. Williams had his wife’s aunt and uncle over to their house at the end of May, they wore masks and sat outside. When it was time to eat, the relatives sat at a separate table.
“The approach is always to find the reasonable risk,” he said. “If all cars were banned, car crashes wouldn’t exist, but neither would civilization. So, we want to find the middle ground.”
For Christina Cato, of Morningside, her middle ground looks at lot like it did two months ago.
“I get the texts from the health department every day — I know there are still cases. They are just sitting underground, and we don’t know about it,” she said. “I’m not comfortable with the amount of testing and the lack of vaccines.”
Except for grocery shopping and seeing her 74-yearold mother — usually outside, with a mask on — Ms. Cato, 46, hasn’t gone out much. Her two children are socializing by playing Minecraft online and FaceTiming with their friends. Her husband is working from home and — other than deciding the benefit outweighed the risk to attend the first large Downtown protest against police brutality — hasn’t gone out much either.
In the green phase, Ms. Cato is weighing the idea of attending a birthday picnic for her mother at Hartwood Acres, with other elderly relatives there as well. They could certainly socially distance, but what about food sharing? And bathrooms?
“I am just a risk-averse person and have the ability to stay home when other people can’t,” she said. “So why wouldn’t I?”
For Diana Repack, of Moon, things have changed. When COVID-19 arrived, “I was a little more paranoid,” she says. “I was hand sanitizing all the time, constantly.”
She wasn’t seeing her parents, who are older than 80, and was still exercising with a friend but only outside.
As time has gone on, however, she’s relaxed. Ms. Repack, 57, is also tracking the county’s daily cases and describes them as “minuscule.” She and her friend, Lisa Jacobs, now carpool to their morning exercise. At first she wore a mask in the car, and now she doesn’t. The karate studio where she is a fourthdegree black belt, Just for Kicks Karate in Moon, just reopened; she plans to go back this weekend.
Sunday dinners started again with her parents on Memorial Day weekend, and while they try to keep apart, they don’t wear masks. She wishes the green phase rules were more permissive. Her father fell recently and was temporarily sent to a nursing home; Ms. Repack can only see him by waving through a window.
“It’s frustrating not to even be allowed to see him once or twice a week,” she said. “He’s almost 85, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have him.”
As people do resume activities in the green phase, Dr. Walsh emphasized the need to constantly assess where the risks of transmission lie. At a youth baseball game, a cluster might develop in the dugout, so that may be a place to focus on spreading kids out. A community pool with an open snack bar might want to consider delivering food to tables this summer, he said, rather than letting people gather while they wait for food.
He also said that while cases are relatively low now, what we are seeing is really a snapshot of where the region was a couple of weeks ago because symptoms don’t show up until after an incubation period.
“I think we need to be smart and not just throw our hands up and say, ‘We’re not getting rid of it. What’s the point?’”
In Upper St. Clair, Ms. Moline was debating questions of not just whether to let her mother hug her two teenage children, but what to serve at her first in-person book club meeting since the pandemic began. Spanakopita and egg rolls seemed like a better idea than, say, hummus or spreadable cheese, she thought, to avoid the possibility of germs spreading through double dipping or a shared utensil.
As for her mother and the hug, she’s still conflicted. On one hand, nobody needs a hug. On the other hand, her husband’s mother died in Massachusetts at the beginning of the pandemic. He drove up from Pittsburgh but couldn’t see her in her last days because visitors were prohibited.
“I’m having this little bit of an odd perspective — I’m feeling all the feels,” Ms. Moline said. “I don’t want to do that to my mom. Life is precarious enough. If they never got to hug her again, that would be horrible.”