Last week, my sister gave birth to her son.
Mom and son are doing well. He is adorable and asleep most of the time. His big sister is not 100% on board with the alien that her parents brought home.
My parents live about 45 minutes away from their newest grandchild. Both of my parents are at high risk of extremely negative consequences if they are infected with COVID. They have been extremely cautious about interactions and social engagement over the past six months. It helps that they live in Massachusetts where testing is common and community prevalence is low. Both of my parents were very determined to safely hold their grandson and play with their youngest granddaughter.
They had a plan.
On Saturday morning, they went to a walk-up testing clinic. They paid cash for a screening test. Things got stuck up their nose. Twenty minutes later, they were both cleared as unlikely to be positive and even less likely to be infectious. Three minutes later, they were both in the Kia and driving down 495. The testing cost them a good chunk of their discretionary funds for August but seeing their grandkids is highly valued.
An hour later, my dad was having a complicated tea party with his granddaughter and my mom was holding her grandson. A bit after that, my mom was in a parade with a dozen stuff animals and my dad was holding his grandson. My sister’s house was a bubble of confirmed no positives/no infectivity. There were hugs. There were dance parties led by an over-active three year old who knew exactly what she wanted even if the big people were not listening to her! There were cookies. It was a moment of near normality.
Testing is the way out. Massive, widespread, common and cheap testing that is accurate enough where we have a good deal of confidence that a negative is a true negative even if a positive is likely to be a positive is the way out. If people are able to test several times a week with results that are returned by the end of a cup of coffee, then 95% of normal, December 2019 expectations based, life can resume as long as people who don’t get negative results isolate until confirmatory diagnostic testing can sort false positives into true negatives and likely positives.
If we are confident that typical interactions of a day aren’t going to lead to infections of a disease that has immediate short run probabilities of high morbidity and mortality and significant unknown long run consequences, people will be out and about. Widespread testing is a way to achieve that goal even as we are also working on multiple separate tracks for vaccination, therapeutics and behavioral modifications such as masks.