What happens if someone in your pandemic pod breaks the rules?

With people continuing to isolate during the ongoing COVID crisis, “pandemic pods” have taken shape, where groups of people still hang out in person, but agree to limit their circle of outside contacts. But what happens when a member of your pandemic pod breaks the rules?

One option is to have that member quarantine for two weeks before interacting with the rest of the pod, with some notable exceptions.

“Our thing has been travel,” Gee and Ursula Show co-host Gee Scott said. “Like if you’ve traveled somewhere, we ain’t making you wait 14 days, but you can’t just come fresh off the plane. Like, ‘Hey, guys, be there eight o’clock, my flight lands at 5 — see you guys there!’ No, no, no. He might have to turn the other way.”

For Gee and Ursula Show producer Andrew Lanier, enforcing rules within your pod is made difficult by a number of factors.

“I think it’s really, really hard because the problem is there’s no exact calculation of risk,” he pointed out. “If you decide to couple up with, say, two, three other families, you have exponentially increased your risk.”

“Now probably two people in those two or three families are going to be going into work, so they’re not extremely and totally isolated,” he continued. “How do you calculate the contacts that they have at work and all the contacts those people have had?”

Co-host Ursula Reutin approaches the problem by taking extra precautions, even within a small circle of close friends.

“It’s a smaller pod for sure, but even when we’re together, like when we watch the Seahawks game, we’re wearing masks or at least staying six feet apart if anyone comes to our house,” she described.

And sure, that may be safer, but where’s the fun in that?

“Yeah, you’ve got a very un-fun pandemic pod,” Gee joked.

Listen to the Gee and Ursula Show weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.