Covid 19 omricon

[Ken-And-Denise0]

Covid cases are surging in Maryland and beyond due the the Omricon variant.  We are fully vaccinated and boosted.  That being said, our basement apartment is below our home.  I am requesting that guests be tested prior to their arrival due to the current conditions.  Any other ideas or suggestions?

[Ann783]

@Ken-And-Denise0 Looks like your guests have a private entrance and no shared spaces… do you meet and greet… otherwise I think you are pretty safe. I think if you plan to meet indoors at all…. all parties should be masked. I have also become a fan of at home rapid tests (if you can find them). They can provide an extra layer of security (but have a fairly high false negative). Your best bet may be no in person contact during guest stays.

[Anonymous]

@Ken-And-Denise0 it's not unreasonable to request, as long as you accept that the guests will be fully refunded if one of them gets a positive test result, or if you turn them away for declining to provide a negative test. Also, speaking purely in terms of hospitality rather than personal safety, adding new requirements to a pre-existing booking may be off-putting to some, especially those guests who dwell in the alternate reality where the pandemic is over.

If you offer a self-contained space, your best defense remains social distancing and buffer time before changeovers. A test result is only a snapshot of one moment before the stay and provides no useful indication of your risk level as the stay progresses, so you can't really put much into it. 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Ken-And-Denise0 I really wouldn't bother. If you are vaccinated and boosted you should be fine. Just keep a good distance to the guests and wear a mask.

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Ken-And-Denise0  What would you do if you would live in a building and share the stairway and the elevator with 20 or 100 neighbors? 🙂

[Inna22]

@Ken-And-Denise0 are you sharing air vents with the basement? How do you think you are going to catch it? Your guests might be ok prior to arrival but get sick on the first, second or any other random day they are there. They can have a false negative. A lot of rapid tests do not pick up the new variant. In my experience the only thing a testing requirement does is that it makes people more careful, which is not a bad thing at all : I know I am going to this airbnb and I will need to test so I better skip a party I was planning to attend.