Have you returned to your office yet? Why or why not?
– I’m practicing virtually, in my office, five days a week;
– I find the commute (I take the subway) soothing and safe – the trains haven’t been too crowded and, in any event, I’ve been pretty reassured by what I’ve read about transmissibility that, at least in the current moment, the trains are pretty safe; and
– I am gratified by the relative sense of normalcy it gives me to leave home, travel some distance, arrive at work, work in my customary space, and then commute home, with distance and time between my patients and my family.
I’m not yet meeting with patients in person. I don’t particularly want to meet with people while either they or I am wearing a mask. My office is spacious and airy – but it doesn’t have windows, and it doesn’t have exhaust – just fresh air piped in. Given that, I want more confident than I currently can be that the person sitting across from me isn’t carrying the virus – and that I’m not – before resuming face-to-face sessions. I have been getting tested every two weeks; my last results took four days. Which is at least three days too long for my taste.
If testing increases in frequency and/or turn-around, I can imagine that providing me with a level of comfort adequate to return to face-to-face treatment prior to “herd immunity.” But I find it hard to quantify just how much testing would need to increase, or how fast turn-around would need to be.
My guess today: I expect I’ll return to face-to-face treatment sometime in late 2020 or early 2021, if testing continues to improve. But I can’t really say for sure, and much will depend on things I haven’t even begun to learn or think about yet.
Postscript: I did, in fact, return to face-to-face treatment in February 2021, two weeks to the day after I got my second COVID vaccine shot.
