Here’s a cautionary tale about how we can fool ourselves into making bad decisions. My father needed minor surgery last month which required me to make a nine-day trip to Michigan to care for him.
An airplane was obviously out. The border with Canada is closed. That left me no choice but to make the long slog across New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, 16 hours of drive time. But I’d made careful plans and carefully marshaled my route to make sure I only got gas in counties that met the Vermont guidelines for not having to quarantine upon return. I never went in a public building, store or rest area.
While in Traverse City with my dad, I did not go out or shop or see people. We were masked up at the hospital on the day of his surgery. I made that same arduous drive back to Vermont avoiding stopping in any counties with COVID-19 cases higher than 400 per million people.
Once home, I figured since I’d been so diligent I wouldn’t need to quarantine. But then, I realized that if I didn’t, I’d be part of the problem – and, therein lies the problem of unchecked community spread across our country. It would have been too easy to justify not following the rules because I’d been so diligent during travel.
I thought of the Vermont Health Department’s town-by-town COVID-19 case website and how all of our towns show 0-5 cases and asked myself if I wanted to be responsible for changing those numbers. I didn’t.
But the ease with which I almost convinced myself that I didn’t need to quarantine surprised me and makes me ashamed. I was in a hospital for eight hours. There were other people at the gas stations where I stopped, some of whom were wearing masks, a lot of whom were not. While my dad had had a COVID-19 test prior to surgery and I’d had one prior to leaving Vermont, that’s no guarantee. What the hell was I almost thinking?
Quarantine ended on Tuesday this week when I got a call that my COVID-19 test had come back negative. I’m one of the lucky ones.
