With Thanksgiving upon us this week, it’s important to note the many ways available to you as a host to ensure your guests don’t have a good time. First and foremost, make sure you ask everyone their vaccination status right up front, and often. Ask it frequently, and ask it loudly. Require a signed affidavit and sworn statement. In fact, request a full vaccination record from each guest since birth just to be safe. It’s better to overprepare than to be overly confident and left vulnerable. This would seem to be a bit of satire, but it’s not far from the truth. There are guides and articles floating around everywhere right now explaining how to host unvaccinated second-class relatives at your Thanksgiving meal. In fact, you probably shouldn’t, according to health experts, it’s too risky.
There are ways, however, to mitigate your risks and highly offend your guests at the same time, which could be a win-win if you’re hoping to exclude a certain group of in-laws that you don’t really like anyway:
Dr. Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and control for University of Colorado Health, has some tips for Turkey Day hosts this year. “Have an honest conversation with whoever’s coming and you can decide whether or not that is something that will dictate who comes or who doesn’t come,” Dr. Barron suggested. “Be straightforward and honest and say, ’These are my household rules, just like all rules we have when we have company.’ And people can decide whether that works for them or not.”
According to Dr. Barron, there are several ways you can approach this with guests. “You can ask them to make sure they have no symptoms and truly zero symptoms. No runny nose that they think is allergies or a sore throat they think is related to allergies or maybe not drinking enough fluids, you can ask them about symptoms. There are home tests available.”
Have an honest conversation with your guests about their vaccination status? That should go over well. There are plenty of Covid-vaccinated people who don’t feel as though it’s anyone’s business to be jotting through their health records.
Here’s an alternate tip: If your Thanksgiving host says, “we need to have an honest conversation,” it’s time to make different Thanksgiving arrangements because your misery is all but assured. You will not have an enjoyable time at that house. Whether it’s the six feet between each chair, the required mask when excusing yourself to the bathroom, or the necessity to eat in the backyard in individual protective pods, it will not be a gathering worth attending.
Have no fear, though, you could just require your guests to take a rapid test before they leave their house to enter yours. That seems less intrusive than asking vaccination status right? While you’re at it, offer comprehensive blood panel tests between dinner and dessert to really get a complete image of your guests’ health, then serve or deny them pie based on their results:
That’s another suggestion: requiring guests to take a rapid test directly before gathering. “If it’s positive it’s probably a legitimate reason not to show up at someone’s house. If it’s negative, you want to make sure you have that in context of not having any symptoms,” Dr. Barron said. “No test is perfect, and you don’t want to be the one who showed up and gave everyone COVID.”
It’s funny how Dr. Barron points out that even if the rapid test you impose on your guests is negative, there’s still reason to be skeptical. No test is perfect, she says, so maybe require two rapid tests, or maybe three for those relatives you really don’t trust. Either way, the more the merrier, so rapid testing when entering the house, rapid testing before dinner, after dinner, and before your guests leave will ensure you won’t be asked to host Thanksgiving ever again.
Unfortunately, though, as doctors point out, requiring your guests to be vaccinated won’t be enough to protect everyone since vaccination is not 100% protection:
Vaccination isn’t 100 percent perfect — the sneaky delta variant can cause breakthrough infections — but it decreases your risk of any infection by at least 70 percent and up to 90 percent, depending on what kind of vaccines you received and whether you’ve received a booster.
In that case, you’ll want a Thanksgiving vaccine mandate coupled with frequent rapid tests of your guests, eating and mingling exclusively outside, and putting half of your family seated in your neighbor’s yard just to be safe. Even that sounds risky, but it may earn Dr. Fauci’s coveted Seal of Misery.
The bottom line is that Dr. Fauci says if you’re vaccinated, and you’ve had your vaccine booster, then you may consider some semblance of a normal Thanksgiving:
“If you’re vaccinated — and hopefully you’ll be boosted too — and your family is, you can enjoy a typical Thanksgiving meal, Thanksgiving holiday with your family,” Fauci said in an interview with Martha Raddatz. “There’s no reason not to do that.”
So that’s it, no vaccine and no boosters, then it’s a no-no to any guests not meeting those criteria. In fact, you should probably stop talking to those people entirely until they realize why they’re wrong.
As experts also pointed out, it’s too late for any of your guests to become “fully vaccinated” before they enter your house and start spreading their Covid germs. They need two full weeks after their last dose, so they can join the first-class family on a Zoom session, but why give them any access at all? Shaming is the better option so they learn.
Happy Thanksgiving!
