![]() But with pods, the country hasn’t even settled on a shared definition. No public-health scheme is perfect, and we will need to layer as many of them as we can in order to survive the pandemic. Earlier this month, a New York Times columnist examined the ties in his bubble and found that he was connected to more than 100 people-and that’s just whom he was able to trace. “I think there’s leakage in a lot of people’s pods,” Whitney Robinson, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, told me. Some are open to an untold number of people’s germs through contacts of contacts (of contacts of contacts of contacts). ![]() Read: The difference between feeling safe and being safeīubbles might sound great-you can have your friends and your safety too!-but they don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. For example, Beth McGraw, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State, suggests including 10 or fewer people who live in just a handful of households, but she and all of the experts I spoke with for this story emphasized that there’s no magic number that makes a group safe or unsafe. The answers to some basic questions-how many people should be in a bubble? what’s okay for the members of a pod to do together?-are still unclear. “That’s the name of the game.” Earlier this year, researchers modeled the best ways to flatten the curve by limiting social interactions and found that having people interact with only the same few contacts over and over again was the most effective approach.īut the details of how exactly to go about podding can be hard to pin down. “The goal here with an infectious agent like SARS-CoV-2 is that you want to try and not give it hosts,” Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. In theory, a bubble is meant to limit the spread of the coronavirus by trapping it in small groups of people and preventing it from jumping out. A July survey of 1,000 Americans found that 47 percent said they were in a bubble. Some NBA teams were in a bubble for months. Third graders have been assigned to learning pods. And pods aren’t just for the winter: Since March, parents have formed child-care bubbles. The basic idea is that people who don’t live together can still spend time together indoors, as long as their pod stays small and exclusive. To combat the loneliness of winter, some of us might be tempted to turn to pods, otherwise known as bubbles. For many people, it’s already impossible. As the temperature drops and the gray twilight arrives earlier each day, comfortably mingling outside during the pandemic is getting more difficult across much of the country. ET on December 2, 2020.Īmericans’ social lifelines are beginning to fray.
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