Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: COVID Risk Tolerance

[Elizabeth Magill (pastorlizm]

We are in duplex and triplexes with a separate common house.

We've mostly let each person determine their risk levels. We have not
made any agreements about covid during this time, but we've had some
discussions that almost felt like agreements.

We wear masks in the mail room because it doesn't have vents to our
air exchange system.

We increased the air exchange rate in the common house.

We ended meals, and then started take out meals, and then had meals
and ate outside.
Right now we have meals, people wear masks in the line for food, some
people eat in, others take home. We are still at fewer meals than in
the past because some folk won't cook and we honor that. Some cooks
and/or assistants are cooking separately rather than together.

A bunch of people are working from home in the common house, which is
new and a result of covid. They do not mask when alone.

It appears that others are doing what I do--if I interact with someone
who is masking I also mask.

Our general meetings continue to be online. While there are several
people who want to move back to in-person, we have found hybrid to be
difficult. A side affect of that is that people with hearing
challenges can now hear well on zoom; in our great room they could
not. So discussion of how to improve sound before we move off zoom.

Lots of meetings happen on the common house porch, although as we head
into winter that will be rare. All small meetings are decided by the
group meeting whether they are on zoom or in person or outside.

We've had some requests that we be stricter with our covid practices,
and a common question is "if we make this stricter agreement, will you
come?" Most of our people keeping the strictest precautions would not
come to anything in-person even if we tightened the rules, so we have
not tightened the rules.

I'm about to run some active bystander discussions and my plan is to
run it twice, once in person, once online, so as to reach people with
various needs.

-Liz
(The Rev. Dr.) Elizabeth Mae Magill
Mosaic Commons in Berlin, MA
www.elizabethmaemagill.com
508-450-0431

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 5:26 PM John Richmond <johnrichmond50 [at] hotmail.com> 
wrote:

How are communities handling differences between members in risk
tolerance around COVID, where some people are not concerned about
COVID and others are still very concerned or trying to protect
vulnerable family members inside or outside the community? We live in
a single building as opposed to separate houses.

John Richmond
Richmond Cohousing