Bubbling with other people isn’t irresponsible. It could get us through this.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Deagreez/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Vladyslav Bobuskyi/iStock/Getty Images Plus., my wife and I had dinner with two other couples. The six of us were aware of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, so we took some half-hearted precautions to make our at-home dinner party slightly safer—no hugging, lots of handwashing.
Eventually, once we’d all been quarantined in our homes for at least two weeks, we started making distanced contact. We went on a hike together and didn’t share snacks. We had a backyard hangout around a fire pit, with each couple seated 6 feet from the next. It was then that we started talking about taking things to the next level.
Quarantine pods, or bubbles, are the combination of two or a few isolated households, making one larger isolated unit. Essentially, it’s a slight expansion of one’s quarantined family. The members of each household agree to exclusively interact with the members of the other households in the pod. The idea is that if one pod member is somehow exposed to the coronavirus, the risk of contamination is limited to, ideally, fewer than 10 people.
Once we were all in agreement about the terms of our pod, we had our first dinner inside someone’s house. One podmate made us all cocktails. Another crafted pizzas to order. It wouldn’t have registered as a particularly spectacular meal in normal times, but for me, chatting and laughing around a table with friends after weeks of isolation was enormously healing,. For minutes at a stretch, I forgot we were dining in the middle of a global pandemic.
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