Two of my friends have been careless with social distancing and the rest of us are trying to figure out how to un-invite them from our camping trip to keep everyone else safe.

Note: I am 19f. Tim and Leo are 18m and 16m. The rest of our friends range in age from 16-20.

We live in a state (“State X”) that is still relatively careful about social distancing, but we are located close to a different state (“State Y”) where almost everything is open. A few months ago, my friends and I planned a camping trip in state Y. We figured by August things would be better, and camping is a pretty social-distance-friendly activity. However, cases are on the rise in that state. Today we made the decision to cancel the trip, which would have been next week. It sucks because we’ve really been looking forward to this, but it just doesn’t seem safe to cross that state line right now.

We do have permission to camp on a private property in a more rural part of state X. We wouldn’t have to leave our state, and we would have the property all to ourselves, which would make social distancing easy. We want to plan a new camping trip on this property.

The only problem is, two of our friends, a pair of brothers we’ll call Tim and Leo, are basically COVID-19 denialists. They recently spent a few days in a crowded tourist destination in state Y. No masks, no distancing, eating at restaurants, going to various places with various people, etc. Tim has expressed beliefs that the virus is a conspiracy (something involving the election, I don’t remember all the details) and Leo just goes along with all his family’s wacky ideas, probably because he’s a kid and he sees his family members as authority figures. Ordinarily, I appreciate Tim and Leo. They are great friends of mine and their parents have been nothing but kind to me. But when it comes to this pandemic, they are idiots.

We don’t want them to come with on our newly-modified camping trip. They literally just came back from state Y a couple of days ago, and they probably wouldn’t even tell us if they got COVID-19 symptoms. But we cannot agree on how to handle it. Here are our ideas:

1. Invite them anyway. This way we could avoid the confrontation of having to exclude them, and the campsite is big enough that we could keep our distance from them. However, we’re not sure if we can trust them to keep an appropriate distance.

2. Keep the new plan a secret from them. This way we could avoid confrontation and also not have them come with. But things like this always have a way of coming out, and if they find out later that we were on the trip and didn’t tell them, it could permanently damage our friendship with Tim and Leo.

3. Tell them the new plan and explain why they’re not invited. This way, we’re being fully honest, don’t have to keep any secrets, and we don’t have to have them come with. But it would be very awkward to explain to them and I know they would get extremely angry at us.

4. Cancel the camping completely. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. But we have really been looking forward to this, and I don’t want to cancel the whole trip just because one family was dumb enough to go to a tourist town.

What should we do?

TL;DR: Two friends of mine visited a tourist town in an area that is starting to become a coronavirus hotspot. We want to un-invite them from our camping trip to avoid getting the virus, but we’re trying to figure out the best way to do that.

Submitted July 25, 2020 at 02:30PM by dolphin9753 https://ift.tt/2D5Vf5m