How Venturing Out Went, Part 2 of 3

(Early morning at the Piece Hall in Halifax, England, before everything opens. Photo by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2022.)

Cautionary elements crept in at Halifax. My wife and I came through unscathed. In the last portion of this post I’ll outline what we did, which is not quite the same as what my cousin and her son did. The next post will be more generally about implications for how to go places and gather together safely in the foreseeable future.

A few hundred people from at least 15 countries attended Anne Lister Birthday Week, mostly lesbians but also some others. Anne Lister was a trailblazer for women, a phenomenally intelligent and driven personality whose impact still ripples along. The largest contingents of Lister Sisters were from the UK (obviously) and USA. The only way to comprehend the energy of this gathering would be to attend it or something comparable yet unique, so I won’t try to tell you how it felt. I’ll just say it was a wonderful time with wonderful people, not only in the group but in the general public. Halifax was not just tolerant or accepting. Halifax was welcoming and as enthusiastic about Lister as we are.

Hazards of Presumption

Remember what I said recently about hazards of presumption? You’re about to hear why that was on my mind.

I hoped admirers of Anne Lister would adhere to science and behave in ways that mitigate pandemic risk. ALBW is part fan group, part nerdy obsession with learning. Our events included tours of places important in the story of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, but also in-depth learning about their history, how their diaries are conserved and protected, transcription techniques, how letters were written at the time (transcribing one that was written across itself is a nightmare), translation of Lister’s private code, coal mining methods of the time, the local economy back then, details of the mines on Lister’s land, clothing in her era, etc.

I did not account for the steady message from UK government and mainstream media that the pandemic has ended. I also did not account for visitors, especially Americans, being unaware that the pandemic situation here could be very different from the situation where they live.

Both the UK and USA have abandoned most pandemic measures and mitigations, yielding to a noisy minority faction that persistently attack public health measures. There is currently no reliable source of COVID case count data in either nation. In some places, case counts have decoupled from hospitalization rates and death rates, indicating how incomplete case data has become.

But the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant has not swept all of the USA so far. Many Americans came from places where the pandemic is in a lull. Some mentioned case rates of 2%, for example. In my mother’s county in Texas, only about 2 cases are turning up per week.

Americans in such places aren’t wearing face masks, but the virus is not prevalent enough and not contagious enough for that to cause a surge. Halifax is in the north of England, not Scotland where face masks in public places are only now becoming optional. They saw Britons not wearing face masks because government says that’s okay now. The Americans presumed we must be in a lull here too.

Reality Hiding in Plain Sight

Weeks ago, enough Brits raised a fuss to keep funding allocated to the Office for National Statistics for its COVID prevalence survey. It’s the only reliable data we still have about how much SARS-CoV-2 virus is circulating. (I’ve mentioned this survey before. It’s good solid science.)

As we met in Halifax, 1 in 12 to 13 people in England had active COVID.

UK he government says we have emerged from the pandemic and masks aren’t needed any more, so most people don’t wear them.

With BA.2 widespread, people get COVID and then get it again as soon as 23 days later. Where I live in north Shropshire, the National Health Service is in a critical incident, cancelling clinics, diverting specialists and nurses to keep general hospitals in Shrewsbury and Telford running. News media don’t mention that. In the news it sounds like problems are mostly in parts of heavily populated London and the southeast, not up north where we met. People remark that they know more people sick with it now than ever before, yet few wear masks.

By the time visiting Americans in particular realized what is happening here, most of ALBW had attended one or two large gatherings. Not many wore face masks.

Attendees began to develop COVID. That meant needing to self-isolate in their lodgings, unable to attend any more of ALBW.

If it had been a more typical conference, visitors from abroad who got sick would have been stuck coping in a country they don’t know without support to bring them supplies. ALBW being the type of group it is, those who were sick could post in a private Facebook group and other ALBW attendees volunteered to bring what they needed.

The first gatherings were Friday night and Saturday. On Tuesday, Jill Liddington (author of Female Fortune —disclosure, this is an affiliate link) had to cancel her writer’s forum workshop due to testing positive for COVID.

A frisson of alarm swept through ALBW. Some of our authors, researchers, diary transcribers and codebreakers are elderly and/or clinically vulnerable.

Staff sent out a message announcing the outbreak and asking everyone to wear face masks from then on if at all possible. The next day nearly everyone wore face masks. Diligence slipped gradually through subsequent days, but remained high.

Unfortunately, the virus was already in ALBW.

Being Sick in a Foreign Country

Being ill in a country other than your own is always extra hard. Been there, done that, and it’s rough. You may have travel insurance, but you aren’t already registered in your host country’s health care system. You aren’t familiar with their system and don’t fit in their usual processing when you ask for help. It may not have occurred to you to notify your country’s embassy that you would be visiting in the country, so you may have walked right into something avoidable that the embassy would have told you about. You know what medications are available without a prescription at home. What’s available in the host country is probably not the same. In Mexico I could buy antibiotics at the supermarket without seeing a doctor first. In Luxembourg (pre-EU), I could only buy hydrogen peroxide at a pharmacy after being quizzed and lectured by a pharmacist about using it safely.

Being sick with COVID adds another dimension of roughness.

So… Lister Sisters with COVID had to isolate in their lodgings. Other Lister Sisters could bring food and over-the-counter medicines. Everybody knows how to do doorstep drop-off. So far, so good.

In the USA, those with good health insurance and some money could get treatment. Near my mother, for a while that was so easy, they would only have to go to a big temporary tent. They’d be tested, get IV monoclonal antibodies for half an hour, and go home bolstered against the virus. Now, treatment might be antivirals instead and it isn’t all in a centralized facility any more, but they could get treatment.

Not so in the UK. Officially, the most vulnerable patients are eligible for antivirals. The rest of us have to tough it out. In reality, from a handful of people I know who are eligible and got COVID, only one actually got treated. She’s in Wales and got monoclonal antibodies rather than antivirals. Sometimes procedural delays postpone treatment until too late for it to be effective, so it is not administered. More often it is simply not accessible. (This is anecdotal. Maybe it’s better in other parts of the country.)

Lister Sisters educated our COVID-positive members about how to navigate the system here. If you start having these types of issues, call 111. The NHS will evaluate you over the phone and advise you about what to do or where to go. If you develop these worse types of trouble, call 999 as a medical emergency… So far I haven’t heard of anyone needing to go to A&E (the emergency room). Vaccines are good at reducing that need. I hope nobody will get that sick.

But to return to the USA, Americans must test negative or present a certificate of recovery. As a general rule, they brought along enough test kits to test for the trip home, kits that complied with any special rules about what would be acceptable. They didn’t bring enough for a preliminary test to make sure the one acceptable to board an airplane was going to be negative. They needed to get additional test kits that could tell them when they knocked down the infection.

UK government has been winding down its testing, tracing and surveillance for the pandemic. Checking Halifax pharmacies to buy lateral flow (rapid at-home) test kits, none of them had any in stock.

After a couple of days, some test kits turned up. The wait for those kits was an unexpected jolt.

Sometimes a COVID patient continues to test positive for weeks. The ill Americans realized if that happened, their only escape would be a Certificate of Recovery. Not every medical practice issues them. Lister Sisters scoured Halifax to find out where those could be obtained. (Imagine needing to do that on your own in foreign country while you’re sick.)

Not everyone who got COVID at ALBW announced it to the rest of the group. There has been some discussion about how to assess the case rate among us without invading privacy. We haven’t resolved that question yet.

It also isn’t clear how much longer than expected some of the Lister Sisters may have had to stay in Halifax due to illness. Extending a stay is expensive at a hotel, but usually not difficult until high tourist season. If this had happened to my wife and me, we would have needed to leave our AirBnB rental on the scheduled day and find somewhere else to isolate. In our case, if we were not too ill to drive, we would simply go home. People from other countries would have to find a lodging to move into that would accept an ongoing COVID case.

Avoiding Infection in a Gathering

It has been long enough since ALBW for my wife and I to now be sure we did not catch COVID there. We didn’t avoid everyone and everything. What activities did we take up?

We skipped parties or evenings in a bar. Such places tend to be so loud that people need to lip-read to have a conversation. Lip-reading and face masks are incompatible. People would take off their masks to talk, drink and eat snacks. They would be talking extra loudly, so anyone infected would be expelling more virus than usual. Keeping our masks on would mean no drinking, no eating, and not being able to converse with anyone, so we wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

We attended talks, workshops, tours, an evening of music by O’Hooley and Tidow, a Lister-themed murder mystery improv, and book signings. We were diligent about masking in them. The scariest was a major evening event at the minster very early in the week, with multiple talks and a book signing session with the authors of some of the most prominent books about Anne Lister. Up to a couple hundred people, mostly not masking, indoors all evening! Minster ceilings are very high but we had little ventilation. That was the most challenging test of our masks.

We did some browsing, especially among shops in the Piece Hall. The north of England used to be dotted with Piece Halls where textiles were traded. A piece of cloth was 30 yards long, and Halifax produced a lot of fabric. Halifax has the largest remaining Piece Hall. It’s intact, in great condition, and still a hub of local activity, although it’s no longer a trading center for wool. It is so large that once an event with a few tens of thousands of people was held inside it.

We always ate breakfast at our apartment, often brought our own sandwiches for lunch and often cooked dinner at our apartment. We ate out a few times. That may not sound special, but it is for us. Since the pandemic began, eating indoors at a pub or restaurant has been nearly unthinkable.

Bear in mind that during ALBW, we had typical British spring weather. That means it was cold enough to need winter clothing, breezy enough to cut through, and rainy enough for us to wear our waterproofs on most days.

The Trading Rooms is a restaurant at the Piece Hall. It has five outdoor dining pods that look ideal for groups of up to 8, and a large area of outdoor tables under an awning with infrared heaters above the tables. Their outdoor seating is often shut to customers and we would not go inside to eat. We ate at an outdoor table there once when it was especially sparsely populated. They’ve installed what amount to cloth and plastic walls on two sides which defeat the unfettered ventilation we want. Without needing to discuss it, even though their food was very nice (a look at their menu will show what I mean), we never returned there.

Adjacent to that, The Bakery had a small area for its outdoor tables, some of which were under an awning. Their heaters were fuel-burners on casters that could be rolled near a table. As with infrared heaters, this warmed our upper bodies. The first time we ate there, the food was good at reasonable prices (nothing fancy, but hearty and satisfying) and our upper bodies were comfortable enough. Our legs were cold. Then we belatedly noticed they have a stack of lap blankets for customers to use. Lap blankets made it just right. We usually gravitated there whenever we wanted to eat out.

We also wandered around Hebden Bridge one afternoon. The village feels like it is full of delightfully creative, friendly, laid-back, openhearted hippies, so it’s a longtime favorite place. We ate out there too, having a Mediterranean mezze meal that was superbly varied, delicious and satisfying. As usual, we ate at an outdoor table with an infrared heater under a roof.

We wore FFP3 (like N99) face masks a lot. They don’t completely block all virus (which is why we were uneasy whenever surrounded by unmasked people), but when well fitted they block about 99%. They are held on by stretchy loops around the back of the head, which holds them in place better and with better comfort for long periods of time than masks held by loops around the ears.

We wore them whenever we stepped indoors anywhere except our AirBnB apartment. We wore them in the lobby, elevator and hallway to and from our apartment. We wore them in shops, during an evening of talks in the minster, on tour buses going to interesting places, in libraries and museums and archive centers, in elevators, in stairwells, in the Victoria Theatre… We also wore them outdoors whenever people were or might be around. When a great many of us gathered around the statue of Anne Lister to lay flowers there, although many people didn’t wear face masks, my wife and I and several others did.

In all of these places, masking didn’t interfere with communication. We had some lovely conversations with other attendees.

How important was masking?

One of the other attendees who got COVID wore a high grade face mask almost as diligently as we did. She unmasked once to have a drink in a bar. One brief lapse was all it took.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Face masks are not the one and only way to fend off the virus. But our well vaccinated, nerdy, international gathering inadvertently demonstrated that high quality face masks are an essential element of our defenses.