How I'm thinking about traveling safely
/It has been interesting, to say the least, to see how the travel industry has responded to the present crisis so far.
Air travel, for example, never fully shut down as it did in the days after September 11, 2001. Routes were cut, which, perhaps counter-productively, meant the few remaining flights were fuller than they would otherwise have been, increasing passengers’ chance of exposure to the novel coronavirus.
Hotels in the most affected cities have been closed or converted into quarantine shelters for those without other options, as in Washington, DC, where residents of crowded group shelters that test positive or are exposed to coronavirus-positive individuals have been moved into private rooms at places like the Hotel Arboretum.
Likewise, Amtrak reduced the frequency of their most popular Northeast Regional service, and suspended some long-distance services, while reducing capacity to 50% on the remaining trains — quite a change from the typical procedure, where conductors frequently demand you move your bags off unoccupied seats because “every seat will be occupied.”
Finally, car rental companies have seen their own troubles, with Hertz already filing for Chapter 11 restructuring after finding itself unable to service its staggering $17 billion in debt, although it will continue to operate, at least for now.
From a traveler’s perspective, most of us are making the simplest, easiest decision to stay in place until the virus is in retreat. But there’s a lot of room between sheltering at home and flying to Missouri for a weekend pool party. Here’s how I’m thinking through the situation.
Are you the vector or the victim?
By now it seems most people have internalized that the reason we take precautions like social distancing, mask-wearing, hand-washing, and contact-free payment and delivery is not to protect ourselves, but to protect those we come into contact with. A highly contagious disease with a long, asymptomatic incubation period means once you’ve contracted the virus, you can easily transmit it to others whether or not you ever develop symptoms.
This provides a useful frame of reference: taking for granted that you’re following best practices, are you more likely to be exposing others to the virus or to be exposed yourself? To give the simplest example, someone traveling from Rhode Island or Massachusetts, which have high and rising case numbers, to Montana or Alaska, which have low and flat numbers, should consider themself a potential vector of the disease. They pose much more risk to the population in their destination than the destination population poses to them.
This principle works in reverse as well: if you’re traveling from a relatively unscathed area to a coronavirus hotspot, then you’re much more likely to contract the infection than spread it.
Again, obviously you should not be traveling long distances and you should certainly not be having close contact with strangers. But if you have to travel, this is one way of thinking about whether you pose a bigger risk to others, or they pose a bigger risk to you. Traveling from a coronavirus hotspot and visiting a crowded bar or restaurant that has remained open in an unaffected region is one way to make sure that region doesn’t stay unaffected for long.
One extreme version of this exists for folks who have already received a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, recovered, and received a serology test indicating the present of antibodies. Due to the possibility of false positives, I wouldn’t be confident that I’d had the disease and recovered unless I’d received at least two positive results (i.e., two positive coronavirus results, two positive antibody results, or ideally one of each).
I wrote about getting pneumonia in February, when COVID-19 was already present in the community but was still believed to be only affecting folks who had recent travel to Asia or who had come into contact with them, so I was never tested for the coronavirus (I was also uninsured, which didn’t help). To find out whether I had actually contracted COVID-19, I’d now need to get a serology test, but since I don’t have any symptoms (or travel plans) there’s no plausible medical reason to get one, although apparently there’s a clinic down in Virginia that will give one to anybody, if they’re willing to pay for it.
Safest: dispersed camping with your own gear
The safest way to take a trip while minimizing the risk to yourself and others is to avoid them, which is possible in large parts of the United States through what’s known as “dispersed camping.” Essentially, it is free and legal to camp for up to 21 consecutive days on National Forest land where there are no amenities and services. So-called “developed” National Forest recreation areas have their own rules.
Unfortunately, the National Forest website appears to have been designed in the early 1990’s and hasn’t been updated since, so it’s a bit of a struggle to navigate. To save you some trouble, this is the method I found to find nearby options:
First, visit the National Forest interactive map, and poke around to see what options might interest you. Don’t click on any of the camping icons, since those refer to developed campgrounds, not dispersed camping areas.
Once you’ve found some areas of interest, go to the Forest Service homepage and search for the National Forest you’re interest in using the dropdown boxes on the righthand side.
That will take you to the page for that specific forest, where you should be able to navigate to the “dispersed camping” page, like this one for the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests.
The term “dispersed camping” is a bit funny to me because it’s what I grew up calling “camping.” You go for a hike, set up a tent, cook some beans, and go to sleep. It usually rains. Only in adulthood did I realize that people in other places call it “camping” when you go to a big park with cleared ground, showers, toilets, and even firewood for sale. That’s not meant to disparage that experience (I had a great time on Madeline Island at a lovely campground), it just happens to be different than what I grew up doing.
Less safe: drive somewhere alone and maintain distance
Last year my partner and I rented a car and drove to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which is a few hours drive from Washington, DC, depending on traffic. We stayed at a fairly rundown Quality Inn that appeared to only have a single employee, and spent most of our time wandering around the site of John Brown’s raid on the national armory and the West Virginian portion of the Appalachian Trail.
During the present crisis, this trip would obviously not be risk-free, for all the reasons discussed above. Renting the car and checking in and out of the hotel would present two obviously unnecessary interactions — unnecessary in the sense that if we didn’t take the trip, we wouldn’t have them. West Virginia has a much lower prevalence rate, for now, than the District does, so if we were asymptomatic carriers we might run the risk of introducing the virus there, while also running the somewhat smaller risk of contracting it there and introducing it to our building or neighborhood.
Riskiest: go somewhere safe, quarantine, and stay
Finally, on the other extreme, you might decide to relocate permanently or semi-permanently to a relatively safe destination. Here I am not talking about taking a vacation to Singapore just because Singapore has its outbreak under control. Doing that simply risks introducing the virus to Singapore anew. I mean that if you are retired, unemployed, or able to work remotely, you might consider relocating to a destination that has re-opened or is in the process of re-opening, taking into account the fact that you are a potential vector for the spread of the disease.
14 days in quarantine sounds like a lot, but if you’re already observing a stay-at-home order in the United States, then spending the same amount of time in a hotel with decent wi-fi might not seem like such a high price to pay, if at the other end you emerge into a society with the amenities or human contact you need to maintain your sanity.
Conclusion
Right now my household is staying on the side of extreme safety. Even if we both happened to be tested and discovered we had COVID-19 antibodies, flying across the country to visit our families is off the table for now, so short drives to isolated nearby locales are likely the extent of our travel for the next few months. This disease is a killer, and we don’t want to die or expose anyone else unnecessarily.
But I understand everyone’s risk calculus is different, so hopefully this helps you develop your own framework for when and how you’ll be traveling again.
