How to safely host a small gathering

Keep it small, outdoors and tell guests the rules

When Virginia Miller hosts a weekly cocktail hour on the front stoop of her Victorian building in San Francisco’s HaightAshbury district, her neighbors arrive with masks, glassware and ice.

Miller, a food and drinks writer, mixes up a different concoction from the alcohol samples she receives every week to review. She pours it into spirits bottles that are set outside next to hand sanitizer. Guests help themselves to both before they take a spot on the stoop or sidewalk, which are big enough for everyone to socialize at an appropriate distance.

Welcome to entertaining in 2020. Your typical gathering or backyard barbeque likely looks much different today than it did last summer — if it happens at all.

But after spending the last six months largely under shelterinplace orders, the value of social interaction has swelled in many people’s riskbenefit analysis. While the decision to attend or host a gathering depends on individual vulnerabilities and risk tolerance, experts say safe gettogethers are possible with the right precautions.

“It’s so important that people do get together and try to just for their mental health,” says Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “I understand all that, and you can’t make it 100% safe, but you can really mitigate the danger tremendously.”

Holding any gathering outdoors in the COVID19 era is key. “The risk of infectious contamination outside is much lower in general than inside,” says Dr. Mark Cullen, founding director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. “You have to worry about direct contact with people and their fluids, but you don’t have to worry about what’s lurking in the air because it diffuses outdoors pretty quickly.”

Swartzberg and Cullen recommend that the guest list is kept small — for instance, 1012 people or fewer — and reflect the space available for social distancing and local public health orders. In San Francisco, for example, outdoor gatherings