Head home or hunker down?
The Thanksgiving COVID dilemma
For Patricia Demirjian, Thanksgiving in the year of horrors will end a decadelong tradition: a grand dinner with a turkey under a silver dome. Instead of attending the lush, formal feast for 18, Demirjian and her husband plan to dine on their porch in Dayton, Ohio, with one friend and the friend’s daughter for as long as they can stand the cold.
In Minot, N.D., where widespread skepticism about the coronavirus has accelerated one of the planet’s worst outbreaks, George Masters has decided to scrap his usual gathering of 19 relatives and celebrate instead with just his wife and kids.
And at Boston University, three roommates debated for days about the holiday: They didn’t want to risk endangering their parents, but they were homesick. So all three got tested - and headed home.
In any year, Thanksgiving can be trying, as families gather in close quarters with plenty of alcohol and intergenerational friction. Add an out- of- control virus, a recession that has left millions without work, and a nation bitterly divided over the outcome of
this month’s presidential election, and Thanksgiving 2020 is pushing holiday jitters to a new high.
With the daily tally of coronavirus cases skyrocketing nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned against traveling and gathering in large groups.
“We had a great Thanksgiving last year and we’re looking forward to a great Thanksgiving next year, but today we’re going to call a timeout,” Anthony Fauci, the country’s top official on infectious disease, told USA Today. The 79-yearold physician and his wife plan to chat with their adult daughters by Zoom on Thursday.
Still, Thanksgiving remains a cozy harbor in a time of anxiety and uncertainty, a magnet drawing lonely Americans home despite the risk of potentially lethal infection. And this year, partisan politics has entered the calculus over whether it’s right to gather for the holiday.
Scott Atlas, President Donald Trump’s coronavirus adviser, rejected the CDC’s admonitions, saying on Fox News Channel that “this kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told, ‘Don’t see your family at Thanksgiving.’ For many people, this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not.”
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a rightwing youth organization, added on Twitter: “Every patriot should throw massive Thanksgiving celebrations. Make them fine and arrest all of us.”
Americans are responding with their now-accustomed discord. About 6 in 10 plan to celebrate with fewer people this year because of the pandemic, according to a Marist Poll survey in which 74% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans said they were shrinking their holiday gatherings.
Thanksgiving travel is clearly down, but roads and airports are by no means empty. AAA estimates that holiday traffic will decline by only about 10 percent this year.
Every car on the road, every seat on an airplane, represents a decision pitting the deadly virus against the allure of family and home. There is pain in not seeing relatives, yet there is sometimes a silver lining, too: avoiding conflict.
It is rarely an easy choice. For Mariah Rush, the decision to avoid the usual celebration was a cinch. “No one wants to be the one to give their 90-year-old grandmother COVID,” said Rush, 21, a senior at Notre Dame.
But the family couldn’t just ignore Thanksgiving.
“It’s really tempting to want to be together,” Rush said. “I just don’t want, if something happens to my grandmother, this to be the last holiday season we have with her.”
The situation called for some ingenuity. So Rush’s mother, Carol ReddingRush, and her two sisters came up with a creative, if awkward, plan for their usual potluck dinner: The three generations will gather at Redding-Rush’s home in South Bend, Ind. But Rush, her mother and her grandmother Alfreda Redding, 90, will dine in separate rooms while chatting via Zoom.
Redding appreciates that her family is looking out for her. “I’ll have a connection with them, which is important to me,” she said. “I’ve been here for this many years, and I kind of roll with the punches.”
Rush will still be anxious. She got a coronavirus test on campus on Friday - a university requirement before any student may leave for the holiday, on penalty of being barred from spring classes. The test was negative, but she knows the results are not definitive, so she plans to quarantine until the gettogether.
“People can think they are negative and then go to a family dinner and be superspreaders,” she said, “and that makes me really nervous.”
Redding-Rush shares her daughter’s concern. As a nurse at a hospital, she has seen firsthand the toll of the pandemic - including the arrival of refrigerator trucks to handle overflow from the hospital morgue.
Her message to her family: “We’re going to get through this. It won’t be forever.”
“I’m just happy that everybody in my family has sense enough to know that we cannot do what we used to do,” Redding-Rush said. “Nobody wants to be the one to kill Nana.”
Patricia Demirjian could enjoy her usual Thanksgiving feast, “a beautiful, elaborate affair” at a friend’s house in suburban Dayton where people also gather for New Year’s brunch, Easter and a fall rib fest. The big Thanksgiving party is proceeding as usual. But Demirjian, 74, won’t be there.
“There are people who don’t want to accept where we are,” she said. “That party is just lovely, and I’ll miss it. But I can’t do it.”
Demirjian takes three medications that leave her immunocompromised. She and her husband, a retired physician, have stayed mainly to themselves since March. They have outdoor meals “with a few friends I deem clean,” she said, but they get their food delivered and they leave newly-arrived goods in the garage for a few days before opening them - a tip she learned from an interview with Fauci.
“We follow the science,” Demirjian said. Not everyone in their social circle does the same. “I have friends around the corner who I can’t really be in contact with because our political views are diametrically opposed. They go everywhere and they don’t wear masks. I can’t trust that.”