I'm a physician in Boston, and I've been obsessed with the coronavirus pandemic since the first stories trickled out of China into my consciousness. Every day I listen to podcasts and medical lectures by a long line of virologists, epidemiologists, and infectious-disease doctors. Every week, I write an essay for my friends and family in my area about what we've learned about COVID-19 and how to protect ourselves.

My sons - Mackenzie, 24, and Cooper, 21 - live nearby and have been what I call "COVID-conscious" since the start. Both kids work and study from their apartments, have small friend pods, have excellent COVID-19 hygiene, particularly with me and anyone who falls into a high-risk group, and both had stayed mostly bubbled at home the previous two weeks.

In fact, we were masked except when actively putting food in our mouths, pulling our masks back up into place between servings and when chatting during the meal.

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But then on Saturday morning, while I was walking with a friend, Kenzie texted me saying, "Sooooo, I have bad news." Half a minute later he sent a second text that read, "I feel horrible."

Read more: COVID-19 threatens to create a 'lockdown generation' in Europe: Here's why young people could be the ones paying for yet another crisis

All I could think was, "Why, why, why didn't we just skip Thanksgiving this year? And now it's too late to stop whatever tsunami is coming our way."

This is exactly how COVID-19 spreads: A person, like my beloved son, can have it, be contagious, but have no symptoms at all, not a single clue, for several days before getting sick.

This is why we were so meticulously careful about our Thanksgiving. We knew it was possible one of us could be that asymptomatic contagious person - not likely, not even probable. Kenzie has five friends in his bubble. All had been tested the week before for travel and were negative. All have been tested since and stayed negative, and all were asymptomatic. He had shopped, carefully, at only a couple of large stores.

And as it turned out, the precautions we did have in place worked. Cooper and I are COVID-19 negative. And Kenzie had a rough week but is getting better. We're all getting better.

Was it worth it to have Kenzie feel immense guilt about potentially exposing us? Was it worth the discomfort of having to tell his contacts they needed to be tested and then go into 10 days of quarantine?

And Christmas in 2020?

No possible way. Not a bit. Not a chance.

This story originally appeared on Schoenthaler's Facebook page and on The Boston Globe website. It has been republished with permission.

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I'm a doctor who tried to plan an extremely safe Thanksgiving for 3 people. It wasn't worth the scare it put u - Business Insider India

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