'We have to be sort of forgiving of ourselves and our our neighbors,' says Wachter. And everyone has to decide what's worth taking a risk for, and what isn't. Individual risk depends on a variety of factors, including where someone lives, their age, and their health. Robert Wachter, who chairs the department medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. 'There's no bright line that separates safe and not safe,' says Dr. In the moment we're in, each individual has to become kind of amateur epidemiologist, calculating how much risk they're willing to take over and over again every day in each situation. Their advice is that it's OK to hold on to your own sense of what's safe and take your time coming out of the bunker. It can be tricky to adjust, experts agree, and hard to deal with the social pressure to shrug off COVID worries. Golden is one of the many healthy people who aren't necessarily at high risk but who nonetheless are also feeling out of sync with the world around them. Parents of kids too young to get vaccinated are worried too.

Golden's still working from home, hasn't gone back to the gym or taken a plane trip, and is still isn't really socializing much indoors.Īs many people return to more pre-pandemic behaviors, this can feel like an especially perilous moment for older people, those with weak immune systems and other health problems that make the virus especially dangerous.

Masking in after effects 2022