Publisher Health

Lisa Ludwig knows how to throw a party. Every year around this time, she puts up a heated tent to handle the crowd, hires a D.J., spreads a buffet of food and liquor, and invites people to eat, drink and dance the night away.

She has pared down the guest list over the years, but the only time she canceled outright was in 2020. But when she sent out the invitations this year, something was nagging at her.

“I had a knot in my stomach,” said Ms. Ludwig, 61, of Amityville, N.Y. “I work in a lab that does blood work, so I see the results firsthand, even before I see it on the news. People testing positive for Covid, or for Covid and flu, or flu and RSV. I had a bad feeling about it all week.”

A day before the party was to be held, Ms. Ludwig told friends she was canceling. Several had already called to say they couldn’t come because they were sick. One had been exposed to Covid at the hair salon. Another needed to stay healthy for an upcoming operation.

“Everybody was relieved,” Ms. Ludwig said.

But Ms. Ludwig — who had a recent bout of Covid herself, and still wasn’t feeling 100 percent — may be an outlier. Heading into New Year’s Eve, the height of the holiday party season, people are hungry for human interaction and a respite from the pandemic. Companies are wooing remote workers back into the office with smorgasbords and spiked punch.

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, Ms. 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 prepandemic. 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. Mr. Xicohténcatl has asked guests to show proof of vaccination and booster or a negative test done in the past 48 hours.

His priority is to ensure that employees feel comfortable and safe, Mr. Xicohténcatl said.

“One of the things that we needed to do this year was make sure that we at least got some face time,” he said, adding that when cases started rising again it felt “like the Grinch stole Christmas.”

“We can’t get out and party anymore like we did in 2019,” Mr. Xicohténcatl said.

Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, pulled the plug on a newsroom party when Covid cases started rising in the area. The party, planned for mid-December, was to include an ugly holiday sweater raffle, a build-a-snowperson contest, a photo booth and an appearance by the newspaper’s mascot, Scoop.

Kim Grabina-Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, said that the party was called off because “the health and safety of our employees have always been our No. 1 priority.”

Already, some partygoers who have become ill are convinced that they were exposed at a holiday fete.

Julie Bianucci, 61, of Sacramento, Calif., an IT project oversight manager for the state who has been working remotely, was required to attend an office potluck last week because she is a manager. She contributed her famous Christmas-tree shaped Spritz cookies.

Ms. Bianucci stayed for about an hour and a half. About 80 people were at the gathering, and no one wore masks. Just days later, she was coughing, and by that evening she was having trouble breathing.

Her daughter took her to an emergency room. The Covid test was positive.

Ms. Bianucci has canceled her Christmas plans, including a Christmas Eve dinner with her parents at her home, a trip to Napa Valley to see her sister, and another trip to visit her deceased husband’s family in the Bay Area.

She doesn’t know if her adult children will come over on Christmas Day to open presents. If they do, they will all wear masks.

“So many things were planned, and no one can get to do any of it,” Ms. Bianucci said. “I did everything I could not to get it, but I still got it and not at a very good time. Not that there ever is one, but this is probably the worst it could be.”