Revising Ingrained Reactions

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping for groceries in my local Loblaws, which is formally quite serious about COVID-19 protocols - no personal shopping bags, aisles marked one way, disinfectant at the door, etc. - and I noticed something emblematic of what I see far more generally around me. The customers were, in general, following most of the rules (except being rather poor at one-way lane observation), but I passed a cluster of employees - one restocking, two involved in filling online orders - who were interacting at far less than a two-metre distance. It would have been fair to call them a clump.

I see this more generally - co-workers standing or sitting together as though there were no pandemic to be worried about. That one stuck in my mind as particularly egregious (especially as they were blocking the aisle).

It seems to be a specific case of our primate brains kicking in with a basic rule that "friends won't hurt you, strangers might". We're built to let down our guard around people whom we see as being part of our immediate tribe.

The rule is reversed in the case of a pathogen like the SARS-Cov2 virus. Leaving aside venues like barbers, nail salons, dentists, tattoo parlours, and crowded bars, you're less likely to get the disease from a stranger - typically, short exposure, more of a distance, unlikely to be repeated, at more than arm's length - than you are from someone you know.

(That isn't no risk, just less risk: "community transmission" is how the virus jumps between social groups.)

Unless you know that co-workers have just had negative tests for COVID-19, you should actually be more cautious about them rather than less so, including procedures such as wiping down shared tools and assigning one person to tasks where two might have been assigned jointly in the past

The same goes for friends. Even if you have a "closed" social circle, almost everyone in such a circle will have some potential sources of outside exposure - work, travel, shopping. (A few exceptions do exist. My 86-year-old mother just spent over 100 days with no face-to-face contact with anyone but my father.) If you live in the same place, you're basically by definition in the same boat, but in an "enlarged" social circle, where two or more households are involved, you still need to be cautious: unless you meet only for barbecues, you're probably interacting (a) inside, (b) for more than 15 minutes, and (c) in reasonably close proximity.

Humans are malleable. We can learn to behave differently from how we did in the past. It's time to start overlaying the old instinctive reaction with learned revisions.