How Do You Plan on Socializing, This Summer?
By: Marcia Sirota
Tags: Relationships, Covid, Summer, Pandemic

Summer is finally here:

Summer has arrived and with it, a lessening of the COVID restrictions. Here in Canada, there’s minimal guidance about how to socialize with people outside of our own households.

One important issue is risk tolerance, because it’s different for everyone. Some people have a low tolerance for health risks and are extra-cautions. Other people have a higher tolerance and are somewhat less vigilant. Some people can tolerate a whole lot of risk.

As a person who tends to be more cautious around health risks, I’m not comfortable socializing with people who are a lot less cautious, because I see them as more likely to give me or my loved ones COVID. When we’re thinking about who to hang out with over the summer, risk tolerance should definitely factor into our decisions.

Another issue in deciding how we socialize this summer is vaccine status. Some people are fully vaccinated, some have received their first dose of the vaccine and some aren’t vaccinated at all. Now that it’s summer, how do we go about socializing, taking into account these three distinct groups?

Being extra-cautious, I’m choosing to hang around out of doors with people who’ve had at least one dose of the vaccine. Indoors, I’m happy to socialize with fully-vaccinated people.

Who can we trust?

Which brings me to the notion of trust. There are people who I trust completely and people who I don’t trust so much. The important thing to note is that this has nothing to do with love. There are people I love dearly who I don’t really trust and people I don’t love who I totally trust.

A colleague talked about his elderly mother the other day. They love one-another but he’s frustrated that she repeatedly ignores the Covid-19 protocols. No matter how much he adores his mother, if he can’t trust her to keep herself safe, he can’t trust her to keep him safe, either.

It’s sad not to be able to trust those who we love but it’s disastrous to trust those who aren’t trustworthy and then someone gets sick or even dies as a result of this misplaced trust.

Trust circles:

We’ve talked about bubbles during the pandemic. I want to talk about trust circles. These would include the people who we trust to keep themselves and us safe this summer. I’m thinking seriously about who’s in and who’s on the outside of my particular trust circle.

I’ve just received my second vaccine and I’m excited to socialize more. Still, I know that the vaccines aren’t one hundred percent effective and I don’t fancy getting sick, even with a mild case of COVID. That’s why I’ll only be hanging out this summer with people from my trust circle.

That same colleague described how his sibling invited their mother to a big party, last summer and of course, his mother attended. I asked him how he would have felt toward his sibling if this party had resulted in his mother becoming seriously ill with Covid. He couldn’t even find the words to comment on such a horrible scenario.

When we love someone, we want to trust them, but it doesn’t mean that we can. And when we do trust them and something terrible happens as a result, there’s a double injury: the pain of our trust being violated, and in the case of the pandemic, the pain of someone becoming sick with COVID.

That potential for a double injury should make us all think twice about whom we include in our trust circle, this summer.

It’s been more than fifteen months since the first shut-down, and the most recent one here in Ontario was pretty brutal. On a trivial note, I haven’t seen my hairdresser in over nine months. On a more serious note, I haven’t seen my friends and family in the US in more than eighteen months. My baby nephew turned two in June and I haven’t held him since he was five months old.

It’s not time to drop your guard:

I miss my loved ones, but that isn’t going to make me drop my guard. I plan on doing things right, staying safe and being vigilant while I socialize this summer.

I remember studying history in high school and feeling really sad reading about soldiers who died just days before the end of a war. Equally, I would be devastated if myself or a loved one were to contract COVID, right at the end of the pandemic.

For some of us, there’s considerable social pressure from friends and family to celebrate holidays, birthdays, or other special events together. I’ve definitely felt some push-back over my repeated refusals to dine indoors with another family over the winter.

Now that it’s summer, how do we deal with this pressure? What if we don’t want to attend a large backyard barbecue because we don’t know if all the people attending have had at least one vaccination? What if we don’t want to go for a meal indoors if other guests can drop in at any moment and we have no idea about their vaccine status? What if we’re being told that our reactions are “paranoid?”

Know yourself:

My answer is this: It’s important to know yourself and listen to your own inner voice. Don’t let anyone pressure you into doing anything that doesn’t feel right. Paraphrasing an old saying, one man’s paranoia is another man’s appropriate level of caution. You should never feel guilty for taking care of yourself, regardless of how other people feel about it.

The bottom line is that everyone needs to socialize in the way that works for them. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. If something makes you uncomfortable, don’t ignore your gut feeling. It could mean the difference between having a fun and social summer and spending the rest of it in the ICU.

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