Coronavirus safety in (small) numbers

Christine Kirk’s son Nico will blow out birthday candles this week as he turns 6. The small celebration in suburban Los Angeles will include his parents and the families next door and across the street that make up their “quaran-team.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, microcommunities of friends, family, and neighbors have developed that distance themselves from outsiders but not each other. Calling themselves “quaran-teams,” “COVID bubbles,” or “quarantine pods,” some of them live together while others visit each other’s homes or gather outdoors. Success requires compatibility and communication to ensure people remain comfortable with the risks. Participants said the support reduced anxiety and depression. In some cases, it even saved lives.

From the start of the pandemic, New Zealand allowed single parents and individuals to form support bubbles to prevent mental distress and loneliness and to find childcare. It then permitted households’ bubbles to expand as transmission slowed.

In the United States, guidelines often emphasized limiting contact to one home even though more than 35 million Americans live alone. In some places, forming a bubble could have violated government rules. But individuals and families like the Kirks went ahead, quietly forming communities that enabled them to endure.

The Kirks’ three-household team includes six adults and five children between the ages of 4 and 7. It developed organically due to compatible risk mitigation, similar-aged children, and proximity.

“This little bubble that we created has just given us a sense of normal,” Christine Kirk said. For her, having fellow moms to talk with face-to-face when her anxiety flared was “priceless.” Her husband, Jason, also benefited from having men to talk to, especially after his job put him on furlough.

They’ve watched Nico become best friends with the other four children as they bicycled and scootered in the empty street day after day. “The three of us would be very different people, and not for the better, if we hadn’t had this support system,” Christine added.

The Bible makes clear the importance of human community from the second chapter of Genesis, when God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). That statement proved especially true for Brian Postow of Somerville, Mass., who lives alone and became nearly suicidal at the outset of the pandemic. He reached out to three close friends who live together and asked to be included. Once or twice a week he joins them for dinner and board games.

“I know that for me it’s been a lifeline,” Postow said. “My mental state is way, way, way better when I actually go over there.”

Mental health experts are starting to embrace the bubble strategy because it can stave off the depression of social distancing. Although riskier than eliminating all social contact, experts acknowledged members can still stay safe in social bubbles if they take proper precautions with outsiders. If anyone in a group contracts coronavirus (or suspects it), everyone in the bubble would need to assume exposure and quarantine.

"The idea is to break transmission chains in the population so that nobody within the bubble gets infected, or, importantly, if somebody within the bubble is infected the disease does not travel into the wider population," Oxford sociologist Per Block told ABC News. His new study suggested small groups or bubbles could flatten the curve more effectively than other methods such as confining interactions to a neighborhood.

Johns Hopkins University public health professor Tara Kirk Sell adopted the bubble strategy, joining with two families with children. Since all three have similar levels of outside childcare contact, she called it “leaky” but sustainable.

“We need to figure out how to manage the next year or more in responsible ways that still allow us to maintain the important components of our lives,” Sell told ABC News.

After months of extended isolation, more countries are warming to the concept. Belgium allowed people to start socializing in exclusive, distanced groups of four in May. The United Kingdom started permitting bubbles in June but only for single adults or single parents of children under 18.