Today, Explained - Will Covid-19 cancel the holidays?

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Last Christmas, I gave you my health. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Halloween is on a Saturday this year. It's two Saturdays away from today. Plus, it's going to be a full moon and the second full moon of the month, which makes it an extra special blue moon for all the Halloween people out there. This was going to be a good one. Then came the pandemic. But as far as I can tell, it hasn't stopped people from decorating. It certainly hasn't stopped the grocery stores from selling candy. I've even seen videos of people building like these little candy chutes to deliver candy from a distance from like the front door down to the sidewalk. The question is, will it be safe to go out there on the 31st and trick or treat? And after that,

how about Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and New Year's, this felt like a good time to ask if the holidays are on or if we have to cancel them too. I asked Dr. Aaron Carroll. He's a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Go Hoosiers. Dr. Carroll, are the holidays canceled this year? Well, they shouldn't be. You know, certainly I can imagine a scenario where things could be so dangerous that they need to be, but that'd be very few places around the country. I think if we take proper precautions, a lot of holidays can still be pretty safe. Even though a lot of the country seems to be experiencing what people are calling a third wave, we see cases ticking up almost everywhere. I mean, this is the thing. First of all, it's important to understand that the country is a big place and that just because some areas are experiencing a third wave doesn't mean that every place is experiencing a third wave. So first, I really want to know what's going on in my backyard. But even if we are entering a new period where disease is becoming

more prevalent, I'd argue that we should still be doing many of the same things to keep ourselves safe that we should have been doing before of the same things to keep ourselves safe that we should have been doing before the third wave. If we were all doing a good job of trying to stay outside as much as possible, not spending a lot of time inside near people, masking up, having no close contacts, washing our hands constantly, that's the same advice I'd give people in wave three that I would have given people before wave three. If we all did a really good job of that and individually trying to do things as safely as

possible, that'd be better than all the restrictions. Let's talk about some of the particular problems that these holidays that are coming up present, starting with Halloween, where you'd have potentially a bunch of kids hanging out together on sidewalks in front of houses, potentially in their homes, where you have a lot of people potentially interacting. What do you think is the safest practice there for communities across this country? If I had to design an activity that could potentially be safe during COVID, I'd have a harder time coming up with something better than trick-or-treating outside. Think about it. If families congregated together in units that were already pods because they're living together and they agreed to walk

around, kids would want to wear masks. I mean, it's the holiday where you could encourage them and decorate a mask to put on. We could tell people, okay, you know what we got to do? We got to put like little dots on the walkways to show where six feet apart is so we can wait our turn to get candy. We could put the candy outside in individually wrapped wrappers, which we told kids,

don't open it until we get home and clean off your hands or anything else so there's no touch in each other. You could even parcel it out and leave it out, separate it outside so kids could pick it up. It's on a Saturday. You could even parcel it out and leave it out, separate it outside so kids could pick it up. It's on a Saturday. We could agree in neighborhoods to say, let's start at 3 p.m. and stagger it by age groups. It could be an extended, de-densified holiday where if we

all put a little work into it, we could make it safe. The CDC put out guidelines on Halloween that said going door to door is a higher risk activity, quote unquote, higher risk. Do you think the CDC is wrong on that? I think they're looking at this as binary. They're thinking like, well, you know, look, look, if we're ringing on doorbells and people are opening it and we're spending a minute talking to each other and while we're ringing on doorbells and people are opening in and we're spending a minute talking to each other, and while we're talking, another group comes up and gets in our face, yeah, this is a recipe for disaster. And I'm like, yes, that is. But I just described a completely different scenario. What I'd rather they do is say, hey, this could potentially be unsafe if we're not careful

about it. So let's talk about all the things we need to do in order to make this safe. And if you can accomplish all these tasks, then it's really low risk. And then that's great. Let's do that. Let's talk about something that makes it harder to be safe completely, which is combining households for holidays like, let's say, Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah. What do you do when you have to say, combine your bubble with your parents' bubble, with your siblings' bubble, and all of a sudden you've got 20 people in a room

eating food in a closed space, something like Thanksgiving? So I wouldn't do that. Like that's where it's like, I'm saying like, yes, I cannot find a way in my head to say 20 people who have many other exposures sitting inside, eating together, or even worse, like spending the week in each other's houses, that's a recipe for disaster. But that doesn't

mean you can't have Thanksgiving. So it's not terribly cold in some parts of the country. Maybe you can sit outside far apart. Maybe you could decide to have the meal apart and then just hang out together. Again, distanced, outside, all the rules I said before, masked up. What's important is often the social contact and the relationships that we have, not necessarily going through the same motions every single time. It would be impossible, as far as I can tell, for us to invite extended family to fly here, to spend a couple days in our house, to eat all together. I can't make that save,

especially since my oldest child is gonna be returning from college the day or two before Thanksgiving. We have to quarantine him first. We have to make sure that he's safe before we start exposing him to grandparents. So we may wait two weeks and have a later Thanksgiving with my wife's parents or something like that,

if we choose. But if we are all super quarantined and her parents are super quarantined and we've made Jacob wait two weeks to see if he's not got it, then it's a different calculation and we can try to come up with ways to do it as safely as possible. I imagine that's hard for people to hear, especially thinking ahead to the end of year holidays, whatever you might celebrate, New Year's, people who haven't seen their families for six, seven, eight months who are trying to close out the year and head into winter and the new year with their loved ones. Do you think people are going to be breaking the rules that they've set for themselves throughout the year? Yes. And I think part of the problem too is I think we keep talking about this as if this ends on December 31st. I constantly find myself being the voice of doom. I think we're going to be doing this well into 2021. I just think that we're in this for the long haul and we need to get used to this. And

this is also why I'm like, we need to find ways to live with this now and try to find ways to do all these things safely because abstinence is only going to work for so long. And this is not going to be over in two months. It's not going to be over in three months. I'm worried it's not going to be over totally over next summer or even worried it's not going to be over, totally over next summer. And so it's, or even beyond potentially. So I think we have to find ways to do things and be connected safely, as opposed to keep saying we can't do these things at all. What do you say to people who are saying, you know what, I'm just ready to rip the

bandaid off and get it so I can move on with my life? Look, I have kids. I do this all the time. So it's like when my daughter is losing her mind and she's like, I can't take this anymore and no one else is following the rules. We negotiate. What do you need? What is the problem of me asking you to wear a mask and not hang out in the basement? Because we're going to have a serious negotiation that can we make this better and still be safe in this way. It's the same thing I would do as a pediatrician, to be honest, as a parent with sex. It's like we don't say don't ever have sex. We say, okay, we know that you're going to engage in activities. Let's talk about how to make them as safe as possible. Let's talk about, you know, what is more risky, what is less risky, what you need to engage in versus what you want to engage in and what really might be too much and might not be too much. And how do we minimize risk as much as possible and keep you as safe as possible, as opposed to saying like, you either do everything I say or that, you know, that's it.

We know that doesn't work. And yet we keep trying that with COVID too. It's not. It's not the way to do this. So when people are like, I can't take it anymore. It's like, well, what do you need that you're not getting? If it's you need Halloween, I can get you Halloween. If it's you need Thanksgiving, I can get you Thanksgiving. We just have to be thoughtful about it. And the problem is I think too often we're just like,

either you can have everything or you can have nothing. And it's just not good. It's sort of those trade-offs and negotiating the shades of gray. All right. So the holidays aren't necessarily canceled, but for a lot of people, the safest thing to do will be getting together with your loved ones virtually. How to make that not suck after the break on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos

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today explained. It's Today Explained. cycle yet, but S. Bear Bergman has. He's a writer and storyteller in Toronto who recently published a piece for Vice about how he made the holidays work from a distance. I did. You know, for those of us who are Jewish, we have already now had all of our major holidays, our big food holidays, if you will, during the pandemic. And it occurred to me that we've definitely learned some things. And I know that Christians are sort of heading into their big one-two Thanksgiving and Christmas season right now. So I wanted to write an article and just kind of share some of the things that we've learned

that I thought might be helpful. What have you learned? What are the tips you have for people from your experience this year? The first one, honestly, is do something special. you know I definitely understand people feeling like oh I couldn't possibly it's sad it's exhausting I don't have the energy why would I bother for just you know me and my immediate family or me and my housemates but one of the things that I think we've really learned is that doing something special helps to bring the special feeling. Cook the food, decorate the things, put on your fancy outfit, even if you only put on the top half of it, right? Like, no judgment. Maybe go wild, put on shoes.

But think about how you can really participate. And there are sort of a couple of different locations of that. One of them is food. I'm Jewish. So, you know, we're always sort of thinking about, okay, but what's the snack possibility in this scenario? So one thing you can do that's food related is your grandmother, your great uncle, or your auntie, or your mother-in-law, whoever makes the like special holiday thing, get them to make it on video and everybody cook along. Like this is the year that everybody learns how to make the sweet potato

casserole or the meatballs or whatever it is that it's just not a holiday without. All right. So we've got putting on your holiday best, doing a cooking class with the fam. What else? You can also do what is basically a potluck. If you only know how to make your chicken soup with matzo balls for 40 people, and there's only four people in your house right now, make it for 40 and then package it up. Get your other family members who live close or your friends and let everybody make their specialty. And then the morning of package it up, drive around town, drop off chicken soup with matzo balls at everybody's house or whatever is the thing, the meatballs, the tamales, the feast of the seven fishes,

whatever is your family thing that you do. And then at least you can all be eating the same thing while you're on a Zoom call together. You can all be having, you know, your mother-in-law's famous macaroni cheese and telling her how great it is. That's good for a couple minutes, for sure. I like that idea. Did you try that with Passover or Rosh Hashanah? We did a version of it with Rosh Hashanah

where we cooked several different things and a couple of other households cooked several different things and then we sort of played match and win until everybody had a whole dinner. It really felt like a holiday, not just I went to a lot of trouble to make a fancy meal for the same people who always eat at my table.

Like part of what's great about a holiday is you get to eat other people's special food, you know, which I love. I love that too. What about after you eat? Pick a meaningful reading and everybody read a paragraph going around the table. Look up your land acknowledgement and figure out what indigenous land your celebration is actually taking place on and find out what the history of that land situation is.

It makes it less like, oh, I'm just eating my food in front of my screen and looking at your food, right? So like, you know, everybody pick a name and make a toast to one other person at the table and just talk about like why they're great for a full minute. And everyone's going to pick Dr. Fauci. I mean, I'll take Dr. Fauci. I could give a one-minute toast on why he's great right now. I wouldn't even need to prepare in advance. Go for it.

Really? Yeah, sure. I'd listen to that. It sounds like the dogs would, too. Dr. Fauci has held on to the best in public health guidance, regardless of politics, since before the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Fauci has been 100% not squeamish, not moralizing, fully engaged in the question of what is going to deliver the best health result for the most people in the soonest amount of time. He never participated in the homophobia that was related to the AIDS crisis or in the shaming of people who use drugs, just like he doesn't

participate in the shaming of the people now who aren't, you know, even engaging in public health guidelines. He's just steadfast and straightforward, consistently doing the work to the highest level. I came on here to talk about Stuffed Cabbage, and now we're doing public health. Could you pass the cabbage? I can. I will. I just feel like I'm ready

to show my range today, apparently. Bear, I'm gonna raise my glass and give my holiday spiels about you this year. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Happy Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and, you know, Boxing Day up in Canada.

Yes, yes, we do have Boxing Day. We did already have Thanksgiving, though, in October. Belated, yeah. But yes, I happily accept your belated Canadian Thanksgiving wishes. S. Bear Bergman is a writer based in Toronto, Canada. Some of my favorite friends and family are out there in Toronto too. I miss them, but we Zoom on Sundays. Midweek shoutouts to them.

And to the Today Explained team, Will Reed, Muj Zaydi, Halima Shah, Amina Alsadi, and Noam Hassenfeld, who did not write this song, nor did Breakmaster Cylinder. Extra help this week from Bird Pinkerton and Cecilia Lay. Afim Shapiro is our engineer. Golda Arthur is our supervising producer. And Liz Kelly Nelson

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