COVID safety: What we’re still doing wrong

We’ve been living the pandemic life for more than ten months now: Wearing masks, social distancing, not going to our cousin’s birthday party. We ought to be pretty good at this by now.

But there are still things even the most attentive of us aren’t getting quite right.

It’s easy to slip up, or make excuses for un-cautious behavior. The folks at the Guardian collected several simple things that many of us are doing that may mean we’re not being as safe as we think we are.

There are a number of obvious things: Wearing the wrong kind of mask or wearing our mask the wrong way. Other things aren’t so obvious.

Chief among them is believing that because something is allowed it means it’s safe.

With Michigan reopening restaurants and bars for dine-in service, many people will have to reckon with the fact that indoor dining still isn’t safe.

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature in November showed that restaurants and bars were about four times riskier than other questionable gathering places, such as gyms and hotels. Another study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that people who contracted COVID-19 were twice as likely to have dined out in the two weeks prior than people who tested negative.

The same goes for interacting with friends who say they are being safe. Just because somebody says they’re safe doesn’t mean they are following the same rules as you are.

Finally, just because you’re interacting with people outdoors doesn’t mean you won’t catch the coronavirus. Outdoor gatherings have shown to be vastly safer than indoor gatherings, but it’s not a perfect solution. The longer you spend in the vicinity of someone who has COVID-19, even if you’re outside, the more likely you are to catch it.

You can read the full story here.