What About Social Bubbles?

Shortly after my previous blog post, the UK government began talking about perhaps beginning to allow people to expand lockdown by establishing a social bubble of up to 10 people who socialize together. A bubble could be households that are friends with each other and live near each other, but the government sees this more in terms of allowing families to come together again.

In other words, my inlaws over here and other families like them.

Before the pandemic, my mother-in-law and father-in-law spent oodles of time with The Niblings, our young nieces and nephews (and another is on the way). Time with Nana and Granddad is not simply child care. It’s love and learning and adventure. The Niblings help Granddad add to the model train and its ever-growing world in the basement. They build Kiwico project kits from the States. (Gee, I wonder which aunties got those.) They play with toys in the living room and library. They are pirates and heaven knows what else in the child-sized treehouse at the back of the garden.

Or rather, they did. In lockdown they can’t. Nana and Granddad miss them terribly. The feeling is mutual. And their Mums, cooped up in smaller houses with them, miss the breathing space that visits with grandparents gave them. It isn’t easy to juggle remote working and home schooling and being a parent with no breaks and the kids getting cabin fever.

Allow social bubbles and that will instantly become a bubble of three households. With a limit of 10 people per bubble, our household won’t be part of it. We live just a little farther over and don’t have children, so we aren’t so often part of the mayhem and won’t be missed too much. The social bubble would restore a large portion of what’s normal for them, greatly easing the emotional strain of lockdown.

If social bubbles can do that, why haven’t we been doing them all along?

Because they allow the virus to spread more easily than it can with lockdown the way it is now.

Go back to my previous post and look at social bubbles in terms of pandemic cohorts. In that post I discussed how cohorts could help organize the way workplaces are set up to reduce the chance of COVID-19 ripping through the workforce. But our risk of exposure is not limited to how we work. Our risk of exposure includes everything about the way we interact with people and the germs they may spread, everywhere. It includes how we shop, how we take in deliveries, even how we live at home.

When hearing a policy from a government or organization and when listening to explanations of it by leaders or spokespeople, we should never take it at face value. We should also take context into account because no policy or action happens in a contextual vacuum. When we pay attention to what actually happens and think the consequences of a policy shift all the way through to its results, that tells a more complete (and often more true) story.

So what can we see when we look at social bubbles?

On the surface, we see relief for the ache in the hearts of countless families like mine. Right now all the relatives I discussed are, as I understand it, in the Unexposed cohort, or they are barely At Risk due to a careful weekly grocery shopping trip by a member of the household. One sister-in-law has been working from home. The other adults are temporarily off work or, in the case of the grandparents, retired.

The situation won’t stay that way. Although social bubbles look like a nod toward restoring society, government in the UK is more focused on restarting the economy. Government wants to find a way to reopen as many businesses as possible, as soon as possible, so money will flow again. It also wants to reduce the massive outflows of funding from the treasury that attempt to patch the worst holes in the national framework.

Reopening businesses means sending people into workplaces again because not all jobs can be done from home. Each business has to figure out for itself how to start up again while the virus is still circulating and nobody even has good treatments for it. Few organizations will rejigger along the hypothetical lines in my previous post. Some can’t. Some won’t. Some may want to but not be able to see a way to make it happen.

It’s easier to think our way through what can happen when we use examples instead of staying abstract. So let’s say a mum or dad among my inlaws goes back to work and cannot work from home, and the workplace has not rejiggered so people work only with people in the same cohort. Let’s say one of the dads in my family has to work with some people from the At Risk cohort. Now the dad is an At Risk person and he’s part of the family’s otherwise Unexposed social bubble.

They all wear masks and try to maintain two meters of separation. It’s common in the UK for small groups of people to have a break for tea at the same time. Someone volunteers to prepare that round and bring all the cups of tea around on a tray. Eventually, one of the At Risk people in our hypothetical work group catches the virus. A few days later, during a tea break while masks are off to take sips, that person coughs or sneezes. That’s all it takes. Now the dad is infected too, and so are all his colleagues, but nobody will realize it for several days.

During that lag, the rest of his social bubble is exposed. The pandemic adds a few more notches to the number of cases and possibly adds a death. But in theory, if the social bubble has otherwise maintained lockdown perfectly, this limits the outbreak to a maximum of 10 people… in that one bubble.

Let’s spin out the scenario for the entire workgroup. Say the dad works in a group of 5 people. Not all of them have social bubbles of maximum size, so let’s say the average size of the social bubbles is 8 people per bubble. That’s 40 people, including the social bubble of the original infected person.

We can tinker with details of the scenario. If they don’t have their tea break together, this outbreak can be limited to the 10 people in the dad’s bubble plus the original infected person’s bubble. That’s up to 20 people. It’s better than 40, but it’s still a lot more than the maximum of two households (the original and the dad’s) who would be exposed if social bubbles weren’t involved.

This is where our awareness of context becomes priceless. The government shrugged responsibility onto the employer and onto the social bubble, so it can express dismay and disapproval at the soaring infection rate. But in reality, a fresh exponential surge in the pandemic is a logical outcome if government policy goes in the direction we’ve imagined here.

In the absence of any other changes to lockdown, social bubbles could be a compassionate way to grant people more human contact while limiting the risk of causing more people to catch the novel coronavirus. But when social bubbles combine with reopening of businesses that can’t or don’t find ways to drastically cut chances of exposure, we expect a fresh exponential wave of infections. It shouldn’t be as immense as the wave we would get if people don’t limit their lives outside work to a social bubble, but we cannot pretend we will be safe.

Each of the options for responding to another wave would be painful. But that’s a topic for another day.