Thread by @MilesPerHoward

Folks: I am a travel writer by trade, and after a summer of nervously hitting the road for a couple of socially distanced work trips (within my region of America)...I am asking you, begging you to not travel until our political leaders have committed to containing Covid-19...

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I live in Massachusetts and back in March, when we went into lockdown, the idea of leisure travel before a vaccine struck me as ludicrous. Hundreds of people were dying each week. So instead of extolling the virtues of travel, I began writing articles that discouraged travel.

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This story, which I wrote for @NationalGeoraphic, took a hard look at the risks posed to mountain communities by seasonal hordes of summer tourists during a pandemic. And let me tell you, I got some PISSED OFF emails from readers about this story...

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nationalgeographic.com/travel/2020/06…

The common beef that readers had with my story about the risks of pandemic travel was that it felt like "shaming" people for inevitably wanting to travel during summer. In essence, readers were saying, "We're going to travel, whether you like it or not, so just deal with it."

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After the pushback against my story, I thought good and hard about the responsibility of a travel writer during a pandemic. I wondered about whether the role of a travel writer, during a public health crisis, is to discourage travel altogether, or explain how to do it safely.

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When the lockdown in Massachusetts ended and Charlie Baker reopened the state, I saw people hitting the road and I conceded that the folks who hated my NatGeo story were right. People *were* going to travel. So I pivoted to writing about how to travel while social distancing.

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In June, I took a few overnight road trips to Western Mass, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island to test out socially distanced traveling. I stayed in private Airbnbs. I hiked. I only did curbside takeout from restaurants. I wore a mask everywhere. And I wrote articles about this.

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I haven't been able to get steady writing work this year because freelance budgets have taken a nosedive. The articles I have written since the spring lockdown mostly cover the nitty gritty of how to travel safely during the pandemic

But I won't write these articles anymore

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By pivoting to writing stories that encouraged travel in a pandemic, even w/ social distancing, I was playing into the idea that it's okay for America to reopen when we still have no national strategy for crushing the coronavirus and no plan to save the economy. I regret this

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It should be glaringly clear by now, as most of America suffers from a summer coronavirus surge, that we aren't going to be out of the woods until we commit to taking the proven steps to containing the virus, at a national scale. Lockdown, testing, tracing, and cash payments

10/

It infuriates me to think about how many lives might have been saved if the idea of reopening America without the proper viral mitigation steps hadn't taken root. Granted, a lot of us felt that we *had* to buy into this plan because we needed work/money. But I'm done with it

11/

Here's where we are in America right now. We have the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world. States that "recovered" are seeing worrying R0 levels. We have a political class that refuses to invest in containing the virus. And we're still "open for business" in most states

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So this is why I'm begging you to avoid traveling until we have a coronavirus containment plan in place. Because traveling right now propagates the notion that things are fine. To travel right now is to make believe that we're not in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic.

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I will not be taking any leisure travel trips nor writing any articles about leisure travel until the U.S. government has committed to getting the viral caseload down. I will be using what little platform I have to advocate for a proper lockdown, a testing plan, and bailouts

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There are a lot of travel writers, bloggers, and influencers with ENORMOUS platforms, and they have a potentially seismic role to play here. Imagine if these folks used their platforms to discourage travel until it's safe: to call on the government to contain the coronavirus

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Me, I'm just a writer on Twitter with a couple thousand followers and some nice bylines. But I'm begging you to think about how leisure travel at this time, in America, feeds into a dangerous idea that's killing thousands.

I'm asking you to stay home, and demand a solution.

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