I'm Flying to the US in 3 Weeks
And I feel really weird about it.
(Content warning: this is another pandemic-centric newsletter so please feel free to skip it and take care of yourself if you’re not up for that.)
This will be my first time getting on a plane since January 2020. A few different people that I’ve mentioned it to have been quick to reassure me that they’ve flown since the start of the pandemic and they didn’t get sick and they felt safe. While I understand the impulse to share this, it doesn’t speak to my concerns at all.
Because I’m not worried about myself. Obviously, I don’t want to get COVID (long COVID, in particular, scares me), but I’ll be fully vaccinated by the time I fly and I know that because of that, if I do catch it, it will likely be a mild case.
My concern is that when people move around the world, we allow the virus to move around the world. (And, yes, vaccinated people are much less likely to spread the virus around, but it’s a non-zero risk.) And the longer the virus keeps moving around, the more opportunities it has to mutate, and the more opportunities it has the mutate the more likely we are to get variants like Delta that are more infectious. We could end up with variants that are resistant to vaccines, and be right back to where we started at the beginning of the pandemic.
So, even though I am unlikely to catch COVID or spread it around during this trip to the US, the risk of me doing that would be even lower if I just stayed home. And that’s what E is doing. He’s not coming with me on this trip and we’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about whether I should go. To be clear, he’s been supportive of me doing whatever I want to do throughout this decision-making process. But it has been a process for me to sift through my feelings and decide what to do.
When we got our first dose and figured out our vaccination timeline, I asked E if he wanted to try to go home in September (right after we would be fully vaccinated) or for Christmas. He pretty quickly decided he wasn’t interested in going at either time, and I spoke with some friends who hypothesized that numbers were likely to go up again in the winter and traveling sooner would probably be the safer choice.
Well, numbers started climbing again even sooner than we’d predicted and I hadn’t booked my flight yet. For me, the decision came down to my mental health. I could take this trip in September and see my mom for the first time since January 2020 or I could go another year without seeing her. Maybe the spike in cases this winter won’t be so bad thanks to vaccines, and maybe a trip to the US after Christmas, but before next summer would have been possible, but I wasn’t counting on it. It felt like now or not until next summer.
And so the mental math that I did before booking this flight was to weigh my desire to go home and see my mom (and a few close friends) against the collective good. Because I agree with E that it would be best and safest for everyone if none of us took trips right now that weren’t absolutely necessary.
So you see how “I flew last month and I didn’t get COVID” does nothing to reassure me?
I decided to prioritize myself (and my mother) and I booked a flight to the US. I’m going to do my best to take this trip as safely as possible. And there are a lot of things about this trip that I’m excited about and looking forward to! It’s just… not a decision that I came to lightly. And I hope other people aren’t making these decisions lightly either.