This Yellow Phase of the Pennsylvania Coronavirus Pandemic Response will permit some additional business categories as well as daycares to resume operations and yet it will likely not be significantly different from what we're coming out of in many ways. In fact, with the label "aggressive mitigation" it may signal that it's time to be even more vigilant about our own personal/individual mitigation best practices. As the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce has put it in their guidance document for area businesses, we are working towards a "responsible re-entry"; in effect, that goes for the general public as well.
The guidelines from the state have proven somewhat confusing. They are much more extensive and more binding for businesses than for individuals. But they do encourage individuals to continue to enact mitigation (hygiene, masks, and distancing). While these measures may not be legally required/enforced, they are nevertheless key parts of social responsibility at this time. They will be how we try to keep the case numbers low and the economy moving.
It is to be expected that with the regional shift to Yellow the community will be replete with:
- more opportunities in general for contact/transmission on account of increased activity,
- more people rejecting mitigation measures of any kind, and
- more people having difficulty implementing mitigation effectively (mostly because there will be more occasions to figure out some new system to do regular activities that have been cancelled or avoided over the past month plus).
Remembering that there can be contagious people who don't realize they are infected, it is advisable to continue to behave as if both you and anyone you encounter are in fact infected. (Though of course if you knew you were infected for real, you'd actually stay inside and even isolate from your family to the extent possible.)
Given all this, if anything, we all need to up our game with respect to hygiene, masks, and distancing. This is not to say that it will be impossible to gather with others, but it will be fairly challenging to do safely and will require forethought. Best recommendations, if you were to do so, would be to have any gathering be:
- out-of-doors,
- with a small number of people overall (it gets hard to keep track of who is where and where they aren't supposed to be pretty quickly),
- with clear physical boundaries in place between people from different households (cones, a fence, a railing, a strip of grass between driveways... this could take different forms), and
- with oversight (someone helping to remind everyone about the guidelines, an umpire, if you will).
And all that would be in addition to stepped up hygiene, masks, and no food or gear sharing...
Being friends with someone is no guarantee you won't infect one another! And unless you actually have zero interaction with anyone else for two weeks, you don't know your own status for certain. Simply being mostly isolated is not the same as total quarantine.
Admittedly, interactions set up as described above seem to entail a fair amount of yelling in order to be heard at a distance and potentially through masks.
In sum, we are moving into Yellow and hope to be able to keep the number of cases in our area low in order to be able to keep more of the economy functioning. All these mitigation measures we've been learning about over the past few weeks will be critical to making this work. So remember, to keep things moving in the right direction, we need to get even better at hygiene, masks, and distancing!
The Sunrise Show on Thursday, 5/7, included a discussion about what reopening will need to look like.
The Sunrise Show at 7:10am on both Friday, 5/8, and Monday, 5/11, features remarks from Dr. Lindsey Leininger, one of the founders of the Dear Pandemic facebook page about information hygiene and public health best practices,.
And Bob Garrett, head of the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce was on the beginning of the Friday, 5/8, On the Mark Show, talking about responsible re-entry.
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