So You Traveled Over Thanksgiving. Now What?

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A traveler waits for a flight at Portland International Airport last week in Oregon. Public health experts say it’s important that those who traveled or gathered with others are especially careful over the next two weeks.

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

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Nathan Howard/Getty Images

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This is the time to be extra careful to wear masks and avoid crowds, because of the increased risk that you might have gotten COVID — and you could spread it.

«There certainly can be a surge because of the travel and the mixing of people who have not been in their own little pods,» he said, calling this «a risky time.»

What happens next depends on the precautions that people take now, Giroir said.

«We’re very concerned about the travel, but what we do makes a difference. It’s not as if we’re passive onlookers,» he said. «We could really make a difference here.»

Birx agrees: «What happened happened. I mean, we know that people got together in Thanksgiving. The moment now is to protect those from having secondary and tertiary transmissions within the family.»

What do other experts say?

Abraar Karan is an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

His advice is that those returning from travel but who don’t have a known COVID-19 exposure should quarantine for the next 7-10 days. If they have a known exposure, they should quarantine for two weeks.

Why does he recommend a quarantine for all who traveled? Because of the high levels of viral transmission around the U.S. right now — including by people who are asymptomatic.

«[P]eople will be exposed to others who are infectious but not showing any symptoms. So in many cases, they won’t even know that they had an exposure,» he wrote by email to NPR. «Many people are saying they have no idea where they were infected.»

He recommends getting tested twice: ideally when you first return home, and then again 3-5 days later.

«This will notably increase the chance that you detect the virus over a longer incubation period,» he says.

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And Karan emphasizes that it’s important to do the quarantine right. «Quarantining doesn’t mean walking around your house or apartment as if you’re healthy. It means staying in your room and avoiding contact with other people as if you were infected. It means wearing a mask when you leave your room if you need to do that.»

Keep in mind that different states have different rules for returning travelers – so check to see what is required where you live. The requirements may depend on where you traveled.

When will we know how much the virus spread over Thanksgiving?

The incubation period for the virus is 2 to 14 days, and people who get the virus generally develop symptoms 5-6 days after exposure.

«If there was a lot of spread around Thanksgiving, we’ll be seeing that around a week or two or three into December, and onward,» former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden told NPR’s Allison Aubrey.

«Unfortunately, we have far too much spread in the United States, and because of that, December is likely to be a hard month,» Frieden warns.

And if you do test positive for the virus?

Be sure to share that information with the others you spent time with over the holiday weekend. If you want to protect your loved ones, they need to know they might have been exposed.

• adm. brett giroir
• Deborah Birx
• COVID-19