A friend of mine recently went to an outdoor music festival and got Covid and has been pretty laid out for a month or so now.

I know some people would say she shouldn’t have gone because of Covid and I get that.

But there’s no reason catching Covid at a music festival should be common. We have so many tools to reduce transmission society-wide and at specific events.

At a specific event like this, a vaccine dose in the last year and a negative test to get in would have reduced the number of people with Covid at the event and the average viral spew of any false negatives. They could have reduced the size of the event or increased the size of the venue - it was so crowded you actually couldn’t move to get water or go to the bathroom, so that’s straight up dangerous without infectious disease in the mix. And they could have used fans to increase ventilation - and help with the apparently miserably hot temperatures. They could have required or recommended masks, though that may have made it harder to cope with the heat.

And if we had clean indoor air and any kind of support for sick people to stay home and recover or mask mandates that were responsive to community transmission levels or even fancier things like random testing and contact tracing, then we could maintain Covid at levels low enough that I’d be eating in restaurants and hosting dinner parties.

Folks are like don’t tell me what to do it’s my life and I want to go to music festivals and live my life and boy howdy so do I.

But imagine we decided, today, after making the world so very car dependent, to remove all the things like speed limits and car safety regulations and traffic lights and stop signs. You can still wear your seatbelt (get vaccinated) and try to buy a car with air bags and crumple zones (keep yourself fit and rested) and drive as carefully as you can (mask up) but driving is now much riskier than it was before - and you still have to do it for work and social connection and to care for your loved ones and go to the doctor.

I’m still taking precautions for Covid and it is limiting and expensive and less effective because I’m doing it as an individual. We should be doing it together.