How Venturing Out Went, Part 3 of 3

Apr 22, 2022

For us, ALBW was a test of whether it is feasible to gather with many other people, often indoors, without getting COVID but still having a good time.

The verdict? It is. Let’s ease into the details.

Last Exposures

We saw a little more of Halifax after ALBW, including extra visits to the grounds of Shibden Hall (where we had lunch from the café at an outdoor table), the library and archive center, Bankfield Museum, and Calderdale Industrial Museum. At the last of those, the machinery of the early industrial age is fascinating for me as an engineer. The fact that much of it involves textile production is fascinating for my wife. There’s a lot of crossover between our interests. Each museum staffer is deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their specific corner of the museum.

Museum staff did not wear face masks. We did. It was the last major potential pandemic exposure of our trip, in large sparsely populated rooms.

Learned or Confirmed

Between our experience and that of people around us, what can I say we learned or confirmed?

SARS-CoV-2 is airborne. Hand washing and sanitation of surfaces combats fomite transmission. Social distancing combats droplet transmission. Those are not our main issue with this virus. It’s aerosolized. It can drift farther and linger longer in the air than we readily imagine. Our main issue is breathing each other’s air too much.
A cavernous space like the minster is not big enough for a crowd to omit protective measures.
Open doors and windows in a room and sitting a few feet apart are not enough either.
When interacting with others, no single protective measure is enough. Using multiple protections is effective.
Vaccination does not prevent infection. (We need only think about flu vaccines to realize vaccines are often not completely protective.) We cannot rely on vaccines alone.
Being fully vaccinated and boosted, if possible, is priceless. COVID got some ALBW attendees but didn’t put them into hospitals. It will be months before we know whether any of them end up with Long COVID, but statistically the risk of that is greatly reduced by vaccination.
Being vaccinated is our last line of defense. If we don’t use other lines of defense to reduce exposure, we gamble everything on one somewhat leaky defense.
Evolution of the virus to be more contagious is pushing us to replace low-grade disposable or cloth masks.
High quality, well fitted face masks are highly protective when used diligently.
Especially with a highly contagious version of the virus, one brief lapse for a few minutes is all it takes to get infected.
Infected ALBW attendees stayed away from everyone else as soon as they realized they had the virus. If 5% (FFP2 or N95) or 1% of virus (FFP3 or N99) gets through a face mask and the only virus in the air is from people who don’t know they have it, probably with low viral load, you can be okay. If you’re near people who are close to their peak of shedding virus, more is swirling in the air and even 1% can be enough to make you sick too. By quickly going into isolation when appropriate, infected ALBW attendees limited the outbreak.
Reports of people getting sick or testing positive started with a chunk a few days after the first couple of large gatherings. When nearly everyone began to wear face masks, reports of more people getting COVID trailed off. Even through a very good mask, 1% of a thick cloud can be enough to make us sick. Everybody wearing masks prevents the cloud from getting that thick.
FFP3 (N99) face masks are not too much of a bother to wear. We found ours more comfortable than our FFP2 (N95) masks.
I saw one woman in Halifax wearing a special face mask that allowed people to see her mouth. Where lip reading is needed, such masks are needed.
All our lives, we’ve put up with often being elbow to elbow. When gatherings are managed so people can space themselves out more, it’s both safer and nicer.
Shopping is not impeded by face masks and not crowding close to other shoppers. Our haul isn’t all memorabilia. Did I mention charity shops and vintage shops in Halifax offer especially nice stuff? (After two years of mostly avoiding going into shops, we didn’t go wild, but we did get a few things.)
Dining out can be safe outdoors when tables are far enough apart and air flow is uninhibited. Small measures (an awning to fend off rain, wearing the right clothes, maybe an infrared heater above, and we loved lap blankets for dining and the improv theatre) make it comfortable even in cold wet breezy weather. As a bonus, a spare pair of wool gloves make an effective improvised tea cozy.
Dining in is not worthwhile. One of our most expensive tours included cream tea (tea served alongside scones with clotted cream and jam). The place refused to serve us at its outdoor tables, saying the tables were too wet. This was a long-anticipated experience for the many non-Brits in the tour who find it exotic and we didn’t want to detract from it by bowing out. My wife and I got the far end of the long table. She took her mask off just long enough to quickly eat her scone and drink her tea instead of taking her time. I tried a cumbersome method a doctor uses in her hospital’s cafeteria. No one seemed truly at ease except the servers, who seemed oblivious. Outdoor dining is relaxing and nice. Indoors, risk ruins the experience.
Most importantly, life can still be fun even while we’re being careful.

Doctor’s Method of Eating in a Cafeteria

I can hardly believe I did this.

My cousin S doesn’t have to eat in a hospital cafeteria. She uses the camper on her pickup truck as a private break room, complete with a little kitchen. In case I ever got stuck needing to eat or drink in a public indoor space, I found another doctor’s description of how she copes with needing to eat lunches in her hospital’s crowded cafeteria.

This is what I did with my tea and scone. Imagine it and have a good laugh at my expense. Here is how to eat a scone in a crowded tea room during a pandemic of an airborne pathogen.

Take a deep breath through mask.
Pull down mask.
Take a bite of food.
Pull mask up again and reseat it against face.
Chew, swallow, and breathe a little.
Take a deep break through mask.
Do the whole routine again.

Full credit to my wife and the other ALBW attendees at the table for not dissolving in gales of hysterical laughter.

I appreciate outdoor dining at tables spaced well apart, with an awning where it’s raining and with infrared heaters or lap blankets where it’s chilly. And my experiment with the doctor’s method for dining indoors has made me love, love, love dining outdoors even more.

Now That We’re Home

What did we not test at ALBW that we’ve found helpful elsewhere? One such mitigation stands out.

Knit Club is the core of our social life. (My wife knits. I’m sort of a mascot.) We’ve met outdoors a few times, but even at the height of summer British evenings are too cool for that to be truly comfortable. KC meets weekly, usually in person, sometimes as an online or hybrid session when the virus is too prevalent. I often wear a face mask when we meet in person. The others mostly don’t at KC, but elsewhere they behave as we did in Halifax. Knit Club is a social bubble.

Two members run a retail shop. Two work in NHS hospitals. The rest work from home. Only one (a shopkeeper) has been through COVID. It was brought to her by the one of her kids who is still in school, where there are no mitigations.

Remember mention that open doors and windows for ventilation aren’t enough? During the winter Knit Club began running a big air filter in the room.

Air filtration is the main additional protective measure I would add to what we affirmed in Halifax.

In Italy, a study found that when filtration in a school processed the equivalent of six complete air changes per hour in the rooms (a common air filtration rate in hospitals), the incidence of outbreaks in a classroom dropped by 82%. Kids still got COVID elsewhere, but that seldom caused an outbreak in the classroom. Rooms with lower filtration rates also reduced outbreaks, but not as much, with the amount of reduction correlating to the amount of air turnover per hour.

Outside of formal studies, I’ve seen at least one school say that since putting in comparably aggressive air filtration, they’ve had no transmission of COVID from one person to another in the school.

This is what can make such things as school, indoor dining, pubs and bars okay again.

We should work on that on now: high volume, high quality air filtration where people share indoor spaces, especially when it’s for long periods of time such as in an office, school, hospital ward, or theatre. If we combine that with heat recovery ventilation units, it will correct a lot of “sick buildings” as a bonus. (Passivhaus homes typically include HRV. Our house is conventional modern British construction, but we installed one small HRV unit for each floor to combat winter moisture buildup without needing to throw the windows open for a while every morning and lose a lot of our heat.)

After science learned how cholera spreads, water and sewer systems dealt with it and reduced other sickness as an extra. Similarly, putting in serious air filtration will seem expensive until we compare it with the impact of sickness, long term disability and death from not having such filtration against airborne diseases.

In Conclusion

We weren’t sure whether being careful about COVID would impair our enjoyment of the prolonged event. We hadn’t been willing to try anything other than outdoor adventures since the pandemic began. This was a big leap.

We had a great time. We wore masks a lot, limited immersions in airborne germ soup through our choices of activities and dining places, and still got to do nearly everything we wanted.

All we missed were a couple of parties. We’ve never been party animals, anyway.

What everyone faces isn’t a binary choice between crossing our fingers about the consequences of behaving like it’s 2019 or being safe by having no enjoyment and no social life any more. With the possible exception of the unvaccinated and/or clinically extremely vulnerable, who may not be able to tolerate the level of exposure we got and therefore don’t have as much latitude as we do… Plenty of fun and joy can be had, including interactions with other people, while still being reasonably safe.

We adjusted our behavior and our choices to fit the times, and for us it turned out nicely.

Upside Down and Sideways

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