Get-together rules: This party season, you don’t have to RSVP -just test

Nearly 60 percent of 252 U.S. companies surveyed in October and November planned to have work parties this year, up from 27 percent in 2021 and 5 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruiting firm. Caterers are thriving after a lean few years, said Lena Goldin, a chef in New York who recently prepared a dinner for 40 guests at a client’s home. She has strict Covid protocols for her staff, Goldin said, but most clients have stopped inquiring about them — although a few families with small children recently asked that the members of her crew take rapid tests.

In New York and Los Angeles, large cities where rates of Covid and other respiratory illnesses have surged, public health officials have issued ominous warnings in recent days. But they have stopped short of explicitly asking residents to change plans or to stay home, instead suggesting that people wear masks in public indoor settings or even in crowded outdoor spaces. Many hosts who are proceeding with parties have taken another tack: They’re asking guests to take a rapid Covid test before walking in the front door.

“I wrote on the invitation that the windows are going to be open, and I want people to test before they come,” said Dr. Dan Bauman of Manhattan, who is hosting a New Year’s Day open house for the first time in three years and plans to spend next week baking cookies and making his famous caramel-covered Cheetos. (Yes, you read that correctly: “People go nuts about them,” he said.)

In a defiant nod to the pandemic, his invitations implored friends to “join me in super-spreading holiday cheer.”

Perhaps surprisingly, many experts endorse rapid testing as a wise strategy for holiday partyers. At-home antigen tests can detect active infections with a high degree of accuracy, even if they are far from foolproof.

Rapid tests are less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction tests, which are performed in a lab and amplify the genetic material in a sample, and so they may miss an early infection when the viral load is low.

But a positive result on a rapid test may actually be more closely “correlated with how infectious you are” than a positive result on a PCR test, said Bill Hanage, co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Hanage plans to take an armful of test kits along when he visits his parents in the United Kingdom for the first time in three years.

“The way to think about it is that it’s cumulative risk reduction,” he said, adding, “We cannot get the risk to zero, unfortunately, but we can reduce it markedly by vaccines, masks and, if people don’t want to wear masks, having them do a rapid test before getting together.”

Another safety precaution party-throwers are adopting: paring down the guest list, a painful measure for many.

In November, José Xicohténcatl, a public relations professional in Huntington Beach, Calif., who goes by Pepe, started planning a big company bash with a guest list of 100, the sort that the company used to have pre-pandemic. But then Covid cases started climbing in California.

The company decided to move the party to an outdoor space with heaters and to restrict attendance to employees only — no clients and no plus-ones. Xicohténcatl has asked guests to show proof of vaccination and booster or a negative test done in the past 48 hours.