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Experts Predict When You Can Have Your Maskless Wedding
Some science-backed insights on when to host your weddings and other milestone events
When bride-to-be Jane W. (last name withheld for privacy reasons) postponed her wedding a second time, from March to June 2021, she felt silly for pushing back the affair just a few more months. (She’d initially postponed her October 2020 wedding for eight months.) The second postponement was to avoid stay-at-home orders; Jane had read news coverage of a potential nationwide lockdown once President Joe Biden took office, which would have extended into March, interrupting her nuptials. Then, when she considered how vaccines would be more readily available come the spring, she decided to buy herself, and her guests, more time and delayed the outdoor Southern California wedding to June.
“I knew wedding planning was stressful but this kind of stress is different,” Jane says. “Not knowing if you’ll be able to actually have a wedding or having to compromise on what you wanted to do really sucks the fun out of all of this.”
Covid-19 has turned average people into epidemiological fortune tellers, looking for signals indicating what’s to come and how such pandemic conditions will impact their lives. While vaccines put the end of the pandemic in sight, America is still in a waiting period. But a maskless outdoor wedding or barbecue is possible later this summer, some experts say.
While it’s impossible to put a definitive time stamp on when maskless gatherings and events will be deemed safe, I spoke to seven experts about when they currently predict it could happen. Their predictions are based on their own expertise and the expected trajectory of the virus, but could be subject to change based on factors like vaccine distribution.
When experts think people can safely have have maskless events
Jennifer Weuve, MPH, ScD, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Boston…
