‘Making sure everyone stays safe is important’
Families adjust Thanksgiving plans in response to advice from CDC
Every few years, Connie Bauldridge and at least 15 family members and their “strays,” as she calls them, pack up and visit a Thanksgiving buffet to give her a break on what also happens to be her and her husband Larry’s wedding anniversary.
The outing is never quite as good as when the two have everyone over to their Merrillville home, she said. There, she ends up making food for weeks as she watches the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. The guys would watch football and then, after dinner, they would all team up — “boys against girls” — to play Trivial Pursuit.
“The girls usually win,” Bauldridge said, the twinkle in her voice evident.
This year’s Thanksgiving holiday will be simultaneously easy and hard for the Bauldridges and many others. Connie Bauldridge, a former nurse, called the group and told everyone not to come due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have a family with a lot of health problems, plus I’m not a spring chicken ,” Bauldridge said. “I don’t feel 70, but I guess I am.”
Since March, more than 282,000 Hoosiers have tested positive for the virus and nearly 5,000 have died.
The virus has forced Gov. Eric Holcomb to issue executive order after executive order to curtail the spread. He recently walked back his Stage 5 plan after positive cases began growing daily.
In Lake County, more than 25,000 cases and more than 440 deaths have been reported to the state. Porter County has reported more than 7,400 cases and more than 70 deaths.
More than 600 epidemiologists agree with Bauldridge: According to an informal survey of 635 epidemiologists by The New York Times, “the large majority are not celebrating with people outside their household.”
Seventy-nine percent said they were having Thanksgiving dinner with only members of their household, while just 21% said they’ll be dining with people outside their household, going to great lengths to
do it safely, such as dining outside or making sure to celebrate in a space where people can maintain at least 6 feet of distance, the article said.
And even with spacing, there’s no guarantee that guests will walk away uninfected with the coronavirus. A risk assessment tool created by Georgia Tech, which calculates your COVID-19 exposure risk by county, indicates that if you live in Lake County, your risk of encountering the virus is 41% in a group of 10 people and 44% in Porter County as of Nov. 20. Kick that number up to 50 people for each, and the percentages more than double to 93% and 94%, respectively.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised that Thanksgiving gatherings be limited to only household members to reduce the risk of exposure, but getting people to accept that isn’t easy.
For Rachael Rodriguez, 34, of Valparaiso, she’s willing to take the chance. Having just moved back to the area with her husband and two kids, she plans on hosting between 10 and 20 extended family members on Thanksgiving Day.
She could spend her time worrying about everyone getting sick, but she trusts her family to not have been careless, or they’ll know not to come, she said.
“Well, I think if families are smart about doing things, they could have a semi-normal holiday,” she said. “Making sure everyone stays safe is important, so family members who could have possibly been exposed need to stay home and be honest about their exposure. And there’s always a chance someone could be positive without symptoms, so in that case, no touching, hugging, or being too close.”
Can a holiday be normal without having grandma pinch your cheeks or Uncle Al pulling you in for a bear hug? It’s going to have to be, Rodriguez said.
“We are going to celebrate like we normally would minus the greeting hugs and kisses as well as the goodbyes. And of course we won’t be as close together as we would be in a normal situation,” she said.
Bauldridge is a little wistful about not having her family around, but she and Larry have a plan in not really having a plan, she said. There’ll likely be football for him to watch still, she thinks, and her stepdaughter, Kelley, has assigned her several blankets to knit as Christmas gifts that she has to have done by Dec. 5.
“There won’t be any cooking and I don’t think there’s a parade this year, which will be a little odd. But I’m sure there will be plenty of phone calls to look forward to,” she said.