Social distancing isn't going to end soon. So how do we live with it?
Surey the npb do not need help living with social distancing -- it's their habitus, their very life! However, chances to develop reassurance and pick up the latest forms of cultural closure have obviously been affected by the lockdown -- no more dinner parties, in Islington or anywhere else. So what to do?
And that’s where the idea of quarantine buddies comes in - although Prof Stefan Flasche, epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, prefers the formal term “contact clustering”.... families or a group of friends could agree to form an exclusive social pod
As usual, our sophisticated European friends have set the precedent:
Belgium’s elegantly (d'accord!) named “deconfinement” committee has proposed letting groups of up to 10 people meet socially once a week, so long as it’s always the same 10
They can rely on class dynamics to produce that sort of exclusivity. Actual social contact, f2f, is still the default:
we [must] eventually seek the safest way of letting human nature express itself..there are no risk-free ways out now, only ways of minimising the risk both to an overstretched NHS and to individuals, and difficult conversations about precisely what we are all prepared to bear. Until more research is done, it’s impossible to know whether gradually expanding the quarantine circle of trust beyond immediate households should be part of that conversation
Expansion by invitation only, I assume?
Why not use online formats?
[Prof Flasche is] an epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [and also] the father of a four-year-old who struggles to interact properly with her friends through screens
Good enough for me.'Proper' interaction among the npb involves, as we know 'bodily hexis', or 'body language' as teachers call it, which is too subtle to be captured adequately by those awful often stark close-ups of just faces.
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