The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘ Trunk or treat’ and other ways to celebrate Halloween safely
Halloween normally means door-to-door trickor-treating, eerie decorations and candy piled high at the end of the night.
But in a year where most things look different than they typically would due to coronavirus, Connecticut residents are trying to figure out how to celebrate the spookiest day of the year in a time when the day-to-day can already be pretty scary on its own.
Some towns have taken up some creative approaches to the holiday. In New Milford, there’s a planned
“Trunk or Treat” event where participants pop their trunks and get candy placed inside, a masked-up costume parade downtown, a “ghost hunt” with locals putting ghost decorations on their property for others to seek out and a “Monster Petting Zoo,” according to a town news release.
But experts are urging caution with the upcoming holiday as Connecticut continues to see a steady trend of coronavirus cases in the state.
Robert Heimer, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public
Health, said some of his most significant concerns with Halloween merriment coming up would be the size of gatherings, location — whether people gather indoors or outdoors, if they can maintain proper distancing — and “exuberance.”
“It is quite clear that the exuberance of celebrations enhances COVID spread,” he said. “People, when they get excited, forget the rules.”
In Connecticut, there was about a 2.4 percent positivity rate Friday, according to a CTInsider analysis of state data. The state determined that 11 towns and cities met the criteria to be areas on “red alert” for COVID-19, indicating upticks in those places with the recommendation they should consider capacity for restaurants and businesses, distance learning and the size of social gatherings.
Children in those areas — which includes Danbury, Hartford, Norwich, New London and more — should especially make sure to keep celebrations “as small as possible, keep it to people who are in the same household,” Heimer said.
And indoor events are “definitely a no-no,” Heimer said.
“If you have to, because of child pressure, go out trick-or-treating — do not do anything inside, stay outside,” he said. “Incorporate a mask into the costume. No matter what the costume is, almost, there’s got to be a way to make the mask such an intrinsic part of the costume that the kid isn’t going to take it off, or isn’t going to want to take it off.”
The state Department of
Public Health has proposed its own series of recommendations, similar to Heimer’s, that include avoiding large parties indoors or out, trunk-or-treat events, hayrides, and traditional trick-or-treating without safety precautions.
In general, if people choose they want to give out candy on Halloween this year, Heimer suggested potentially having a designated dispenser handing out the goods, or putting out a few pieces out on a cookie sheet, so that people aren’t digging around for chocolate or other sweets in a container.
And that dispenser, or adults walking around with children on the holiday, might want to get a COVID-19 test a few days in advance to make sure it’s safe for them to do so, he said. If kids aren’t feeling well, they should stay home, he added.
Michael Urban, an occupational therapist who works in the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven, loves Halloween and said he typically sees about 1,200 kids who stop by to trick or treat at his home. This year, though, his family isn’t decorating the house with their traditional decorations to dissuade people from coming by.
In terms of the most ideal ways to spend the holiday safely, Urban said it comes down to what works best for specific communities and how busy the candy-grabbing effort usually is.
“I would just say, you know, make sure the kids are wearing a [protective] mask when they’re not congregating,” he said. “Make sure they know you’re not stopping to talk to people, and keep your distance from everyone.”
Heimer recalled Halloween celebrations in his New York neighborhood growing up, when a group of kids from his block — from different families, and a variety of age groups — would meet up. This year, that’s “what you want to avoid,” he said.
“Often when you run mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, random mixing of people in a population is often like, the worst outcome,” he said. “You get the most people infected. So let’s avoid random mixing.”
Melissa Whitson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Haven and a licensed psychologist, said the holiday presents a “great opportunity” for children during the pandemic — with proper alterations, they’ll have something to look forward to and feel a sense of community.
“Any ways that we can foster a sense of community — for children, for schools, for neighborhoods — will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the children,” she said. “And so, even if your neighborhood celebrates Halloween but it looks different, it’s still something that they’re doing together that’s increasing this kind of sense of belonging, this sense of connection to other people in the neighborhood, or in the school or in the apartment building, whatever it is.”
With her six-year-old daughter, Whitson is planning a candy scavenger hunt in their yard and to walk around the neighborhood in costumes.
“It alleviates the worries about having kids converged in one area and not being able to keep their distance, or of the handing over of candy and things like that,” she said. “So, trying to do things as similar as you can but even having some adjustments, that might be something new and exciting, because it’s new and different, is a good way to approach it.”
If they do partake in festivities, though, people should also keep in mind the possibility of needing to conduct contact tracing and how they’ll keep track of who they’ve been around, Heimer said, in case someone tests positive after being out and about on the holiday.
And at the end of the day, Heimer said people will need to conduct their own, individual risk assessments.
“I think the thing to remember about this particular infectious disease, because of its fairly ease of being spread, ease of transmission, is what you do does not just affect you,” he said. “The idea is to minimize the opportunity for disease to spread into different pockets within the community.”