Quarantine Fatigue Is Real

can start easing up on staying at home. The US has never ordered so many to stay at home all at once, and we might be seeing the limits that citizens are willing to handle. Katherine Shaver, reporter at the Washington Post, joins us for how people are over quarantine. Thanks for joining us, Katherine, good to be here, Thank you. I wanted to talk about quarantine fatigue. It's real, and researchers right now are finding that Americans are starting to venture out a little bit more despite a lot of

stay at home orders. A quick story case and point on all this. I live in California, in Los Angeles, and we've seen this happen across the country. In some other states, but local officials have made these efforts to keep public beaches, parks, and big open spaces accessible for people for mental and physical well being. This past weekend, we had a heat wave and people went out to the beach in droves in Orange County specifically, the whole state isn't open up like that, and we saw a

bunch of pictures. The governor of California kind of was shaking his finger at people, saying that's not the way to do it. But people are getting tired of staying at home, and as this thing keeps going, we don't have a lot of end dates in sight. People are getting restless. So Captain tell us a little bit more about this. Because researchers have been tracking smartphone data to

see how people are staying at home or not. They've been looking at the location data from our smartphone apps, and basically, on any day when a phone travels more than a mile, they assume that that phone is not staying home that day that it made a trip. And they've been looking at this since the middle of March. When they stay at homeowners began to effect and the data is aggregated, it's anonymous or not tracking where you

and your cell phone are individually going. But as they started to look at it, the percentage of people staying home with the percentage of their phone staying home grew gradually for several weeks after mid March, and then a kind of plateaued at about thirty three to percent of

the country on average. But what really worried them was starting the week of April, they noticed that the percent started to decline, and in fact, by the end of the week April seventeen, it had dropped at on average nationwide. So they're really worried about this shift and momentum. And the reason they're really worried is it's not like people started going back to work. The percentage of trips that

were non work trips pretty much stayed the same. But the number of trips that people were taking for personal reasons, going out to the store, maybe going you know, driving out to apart to take a walk, those are the trips that went up, and so that's what really concerned them. What there was this shift and momentum of people who apparently are getting restless, board lonely, and really starting to

venture out more. And it's pretty noteworthy. I mean, really, this is the first pandemic that many of us have experienced that you know, everybody always goes back to the Spanish flu of nineteen eighteen. That's so long ago, and really this hasn't been done in the modern era, and nobody knows how much people will tolerate. There's other countries that have lockdown orders that have happened before, but the United States doesn't really do that, and we don't know

how much people will take. And you mentioned some of the numbers. You know, a dip from like thirty four or thirty three down it doesn't seem like much, but these sample sizes are so big because they're looking at so much data that any movement there is kind of significant. And what I found was really interesting was the public health experts I spoke with said, we know how long people are willing to maybe stay quarantined in their house. Like during H one and one, some people were quarantined.

During Stars one, some people were quarantined, but usually that's for about fourteen days to twenty one days max. And those are usually such targeted quarantines that local health officials can check it with folks every day. And how are you feeling just a reminder you need to stay isolated, keep going, and that's how they prevent quarantine fatigue in

those situations. But you're right, nobody has any idea how on a nationwide scale, when you don't have somebody calling you every day and saying keep going, Nobody knows how long people are going to be willing to put up with cavin fever for the greater good or to protect my family. So they're very intrigued by all of this and what do they need to do to kind of keep people going into these extraordinary circumstances. It's so tough

even for health officials and local government officials. It would be almost impossible, probably the wrong way to approach it if they said, you know what, guys were really going to be locked down until June. That's why we're getting these kind of well the orders extended until May fifteenth. The order is extended to because if you just say, hey, we're gone for two months, people are gonna start rebelling initially and then beyond that, you know, you see some

other states starting to reopen thing. There could be a little bit of that kind of jealousy thing almost like why can they go out and play and we can't. So I'm sure you're gonna start seeing this a lot more everywhere, and the confusion that so's also some governors are starting to say, well, we're formulating those plans, we will start opening soon, and people are probably taking that as well. I can start easing my own restrictions. Now I'm wearing my face mask. Let's just go out now.

I spoke with one public health expertise said, it's kind of like a kid right before Christmas. You start hearing about governors talking about reopening economies, and people start thinking, well, really, how bad could it be. We'll put on my face mask, I'll stay six feet away from people. But they say they're really concerned because the more people are venturing out, the more likely they are to be in places like

grocery stores or drug stores. And you can do all you can to try to limit your exposure, but you are still increasing the risk of transmission. Beyond that, it takes a little bit of time to gather the data and then crunch the numbers. We won't know for a couple of weeks. Let's say if these people that have started moving a little bit early might have come down with coronavirus, increased number of cases is or hospitalizations or death We won't know that for some time as well.

The medical experts I talked to said they're very curious about whether the increase in travel is going to lead to an increase in hospitalizations and deaths. They say they can't really look at whether, at least for an increase in just cases overall, because testing is still so limited

that that's not really a reliable indicator. But it's going to take at least several weeks to start saying if more people end up in the hospital or more people end up dying, and then they might be able to look back and say, hey, that's when that county started to have people venture out, or that's when that state lifted restrictions and people started going out. About one last

note about how people are moving. Personal daily trips had increased about four and then trips between counties and states also increased. And basically if you're out or you haven't moved for more than ten minutes or so, you're kind of still classified as staying at home. But everything is basically starting to increase in some form or another. The way they say that we're going to start saying this.

It's not like people hit the wall and us run screaming out of their homes and saying, you know, I'm I'm going back to life as normal. It's really more of kind of a slippery slope where we start bending the rules. Or maybe a few weeks ago, we would go to the grocery store on Monday and we would get everything we needed for the next eight days and

we wouldn't go back out again. But maybe now by Friday, my bananas are starting to get a little brown, or I'm running a little low on ice cream, and I'm also thinking, you know, I've been stuck at home for five days. I just want to get a breath of fresh air, change of scenery. I'm just going to run out to Target and maybe making another run. So now I've made two trips in my week instead of one.

And that's what they're really concerned about. We all just start loosening up just a little bit, and that's what they're afraid of. An aggregate could become a real problem. The numbers are starting to show it, and itcnotally. I can tell you that that quarantine fatigue is real. People are just telling me all over the place they're itching to get out and making these shorter trips, and and doing it more frequently. So we'll have to be vigilant with all of this to stop the spread. But it's hard.

It really is. Catherine Shaver, reporter, The Washington Post. Thank you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts