Innovative ways to safely celebrate Halloween amid the COVID pandemic

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.”