A Piece of Halloween Fiction?

I wasn’t surprised to read Alan Ferdman’s piece on Halloween (Nov. 6). I probably should have just skipped it because all he did was annoy me with his often false statements.

He felt compelled to blast medical experts as “talking heads pretending to know how to solve the COVID pandemic.”

Well, I’d certainly rather listen to the medical - cating without having a factual basis.

I think we all know who the No. 1 “talking head” is!

Ferdman continues by saying that “little science [on COVID] exists today.” Oh, really? I dare say he isn’t making much of an effort to do his due diligence. Calling the deaths of more than 200,000 people in the U.S. (while not even mentioning the rest of the world) a fable is pure nonsense. His spreading of truly fake news such as the claim that doctors and medical facilities are falsifying the COVID death designation is ludicrous.

I too remember “Santa Clarita” (Valley) in the mid-1960s. However, Ferdman’s statement that Santa Clarita had a population of a quarter of today’s (today it’s 210,543 so that equals 52,636) is off base. In 1960 we had about 23,000 souls, in 1965 we had 35,000, and in 1970 we had 57,500. Why is this meaningful? Because it shows how Ferdman’s whole piece is not factually based. His reminiscing about the fake news of the ’70s with razor blades and pins reportedly in candy reminds me how false rumors spread. Some incidents happened but they were certainly not widespread, so how he concludes that “many parents ended their children’s Halloween” I don’t know. Trick-oraway, and new families populate neighborhoods.

Fortunately Ferdman ended his treatise on a positive note, to wit, children out trick-or-treating. I disagree that this means that “normalcy may be returning sooner than expected.” If we listen to the experts (not the political talking heads), we know that we have a long road ahead of us.

Patrick Comey Santa Clarita