How Venturing Out Went, Part 1 of 3
(Uber Boats by Thames Clippers, image from Visit Britain Shop)
The biggest headline from the grand venture out by my wife and me in Halifax and by my cousin and her son in London? High-quality face masks work very well when used diligently indoors and anytime too many people are around.
I waited to write this after all of us have been home at least a couple of days longer than the time the virus would need to make us test positive, so I would be able to provide this write-up knowing how our experiment turned out. Let’s begin with the complete success story, then move on to the one with some cautionary elements, and wrap up with where we can go from here (figuratively, not literally).
Air Travel
Cousin S and son C flew from the western USA, so they spent a long time in a tin can packed with other people in both directions. On the return trip, at Heathrow they did not encounter any of the issues being reported at UK airports. (By contrast, some of the people at our event flew via Manchester, where the queue to go through security was up to 7 hours long. People with flights at 15:00 got up and went to the airport at 05:00 in hope of catching their flights.)
Waiting for the return flight, S said, “I don’t love the way Heathrow is set up, with a huge area with all the shops and food, and you can’t even go to your gate until 30 min before. I thought for sure we would get COVID there, of all places, but so far, so good.”
Having done a little work for NATS (National Air Traffic Controllers) in the UK, I know this is a key part of how major airports make money. There are systems for modeling footfall in an airport to make sure passengers have to go past and spend time near as many tempting shops as possible. Other systems track how much dwell time passengers spend in the retail area and how much money they spend.
As in many aspects of modern life, the airport’s compulsion to generate revenue and profit is at odds with public health in a pandemic. Public health is compelled to reduce potential exposure, not encourage people to mingle. There are ways to make the airport’s need for retail revenue safer such as more filtration of indoor air, more ventilation, requiring high quality face masks for everyone who can wear them… I’ll say more about that in a general sense later in this series.
Sightseeing
S & C did more in a week than my wife and I would accomplish in twice as much time. If you have ever been to London, you know how crowded the city is. Their activities included:
Harry Potter studio tour
Walking tour for Muggles
Climbed the O2 Arena, descending in a thunderstorm
Took an Uber boat down the Thames river
Took a train to see the white cliffs of Dover
Toured a National Trust site at Dover
Toured the Fan Bay Deep Shelter (used in WW1 and WW2) at Dover
Walked to Dover Castle and looked around
Saw the Changing of the Guard
Went to the Imperial War Museums in London (Holocaust exhibit was “haunting and amazing”)
Saw the new Fantastic Beasts movie
They did all that at a time when 1 out of 12 to 1 out of 13 people in England had active COVID. They have not gotten COVID.
How Did They Do That?
S is a doctor, frontline medical care. She knows what constitutes good personal protective equipment. She and C wore N95-type face masks, which she knows how to fit properly.
You may be thinking masks have to be removed for eating and drinking, so how did they handle that?
S & C rented accommodation was near a London Underground station about 40 minutes from Heathrow on the Piccadilly line.
Every morning they ate breakfast in their room, then went out for the day. They ate lunch out. Lunch is the easiest meal to find relatively cheaply and eat outdoors somewhere. On their way back to their room in the evening, they bought a “ready meal” (British terminology for what Americans used to call a TV dinner) to heat and eat in their room.
A Waitrose was near their room. S marvels at the food there. She asked whether everyone here eats food like what she found in that supermarket. I explained that Waitrose is upmarket. It’s where people with plenty of money shop. Most of us can’t afford it. For a vacation adventure for S & C, it was ideal. As Jack Monroe, the Bootstrap Cook, can attest, price inflation for food here is highest on fundamentals and lower priced items. Prices of higher-end foodstuffs such as the good quality ready meals S & C ate have hardly budged. They could eat the nicest ready meals from a posh supermarket and spend much less than tourists who dine at restaurants. On an adventure where the budget expects to splash out a bit anyway, Waitrose ready meals were a bargain compared with how they might have eaten a few years ago.
In Short
S & C had a jam-packed, delightful, once in a lifetime trip to London and Dover. They did it when community prevalence of a pandemic was sky high where they visited. They were diligent about taking precautions.
They didn’t get infected.