Family with cancer history will have virtual Thanksgiving
Sonora residents Kristin and Joe Sveum usually celebrate the winter holidays in the Bay Area with extended family from seven households. Due to COVID-19 concerns and a history of cancer among their relatives, this year they are going to have virtual family gatherings.
“We’re not canceling holidays this year,” Kristin Sveum said Tuesday in a phone interview. “Instead of traveling, we’re a big family, we’re going to have Zoom holidays. Instead of traveling from Sonora, San Jose, Santa Clara, Napa, Santa Barbara and Bass Lake, we’re having a Zoom Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.”
The Sveums said they plan to do all their holiday traditions virtually, with about 20 other family members elsewhere in California, from giving thanks together and eating pie, to hanging socks, making popcorn balls, and opening gifts together.
“Zoom is going to waive the rule, over 40-minute calls will be OK,” Kristin Sveum said. “Even if it’s just to eat pie, we can all be together at
“You can create new traditions and have a lot of fun and you don’t have to sleep out the door. We as a family can create new, fun ways to make memories that will last a lifetime.”
— Kristin Sveum, planning to gather with family on Thanksgiving Day via Zoom
the same time.”
The videoconferencing tech company headquartered in San Jose announced Nov. 10 it’s lifting the 40-minute limit for all Zoom meetings globally for Thanksgiving, from 9 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday to 9 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, “so your family gatherings don’t get cut short.”
The Sveums said they are concerned about COVID-19 because Joe Sveum has survived stage-three colon cancer, at least two other family members have died of cancer, and Kristin Sveum’s 68-year-old brother is currently fighting cancer and doing chemotherapy at home.
“He’s been sheltering since March because of the COVID,” Kristin Sveum said of her brother Mark Wilhelm. “He doesn’t go out at all.”
In addition, a Sonora neighbor who tested positive for coronavirus in early October had a heart attack and died.
Kristin Sveum is 62 years old and Joe Sveum is 63. They’ve been residents of Sonora for 20 years and are not working right now because their school-bus driver jobs are on hold.
When the couple works, they do special needs transportation for Tuolumne County and are based out of Sonora High School. They couldn’t work earlier this year due to pandemic restrictions, then Kristin Sveum had hip surgery and her husband had two surgeries.
Given their family’s history with cancer, and current worries about coronavirus, the Sveums have decided not to take any chances with pandemic protocols and holiday gatherings.
“Our family has been through a lot in the past 15 years,” Kristin Sveum said. “My husband went for a colonoscopy 13 years ago, when he was 50. They found he had stage-three colon cancer. They did surgery to remove part of the intestine, then there was chemotherapy for eight months. He licked it one year.”
Kristin Sveum said her sister-in-law, Alta, who used to live in Santa Barbara, and her Uncle Bill, who used to live in Santa Clara, have both died from cancer in the past decade.
“My immune system is still a concern,” Joe Sveum said. “Cancer is one thing. I call it the C-word.”
If there was a simple way for everyone to avoid getting cancer, like by just doing things like wearing a mask, everyone would do it, Joe Sveum said, because “cancer is that god awful thing that kills people.”
“COVID can kill, too,” he said. “It’s another Cword to me. It can kill. They say it’s a 99-percent survival rate for COVID, that’s wonderful. But would you want to say goodbye to 1 percent of everybody you know, simply because people don’t want to wear masks?”
Their neighbor who tested positive for COVID-19 before she had a heart attack was in her early 60s. She lived around the corner from the Sveums and was a dear friend for the past 10 years. She was a working woman with responsibilities, she was a good person, and she was in good shape for her early 60s.
“She was in better shape than me,” Kristin Sveum said. “This was a shock. We found out all this after the fact. There was some shaming going on. They kept it within their family. They were quarantined at their house, and she had a heart a track and she died. Her husband is more frail than she was and he survived it. He tested positive. I got a text from her husband, she’d passed. It just floored us. We couldn’t go see him because he was still quarantined.”
A poll conducted by Ohio State University earlier this month found as many as two out of five Americans plan to attend Thanksgiving gatherings of 10 or more people. That worries some health professionals because Canada, which celebrates its fall harvest and Thanksgiving holiday in early October, has seen coronavirus infections surge since Oct. 12 when the nation observed Jour de l’action de Grâce, Thanksgiving Day.
Four Canadian provinces reported new highs for daily COVID-19 infections on Saturday, the Canadian Press agency reported. The virus is surging in some of the country’s most vulnerable areas, including New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, which all reported new single-day peaks.
The California Department of Public Health released updated guidelines for preventing COVID-19 at group gatherings, defined as social situations that bring together people from different households at the same time in a single space or place, earlier this month.
Among the basics and common sense recommendations is the advice that the safest ways to gather are to spend time with people who are already part of the same household; to gather virtually; or to gather outdoors.
“In general, the more people from different households a person interacts with at a gathering, the closer the physical interaction is, and the longer the interaction lasts, the higher the risk that a person with a COVID-19 infection, symptomatic or asymptomatic, may spread it to others,” the current CDPH guidelines state.
Public health studies have shown the risk of transmission increases in indoor spaces, especially when there isn’t appropriate ventilation. All gatherings pose higher risks of transmission and spread of COVID-19 when people mix from different households and communities.
“The likelihood of transmission and spread increases with laughing, singing, loud talking and difficulty maintaining physical distance,” the current CDPH guidelines state.
Limiting attendance at gatherings can reduce risk of spread and improves ability to perform effective contact tracing if a positive case is discovered later. People who choose to attend gatherings should discuss and agree upon specific group rules before getting together.
Mandatory state guidelines on gatherings include that gatherings with more than three households are prohibited. This includes everyone present, including hosts and guests.
All gatherings must be held outdoors in counties in the purple tier for widespread risk, including Tuolumne County, the current CDPH guidelines state. Indoor gatherings are strongly discouraged in all the other tiers: red, orange and yellow.
If gatherings are held indoors, increased fresh air circulation by opening windows or doors, especially in the rooms where people are gathering, can help reduce spread of coronavirus.
Gatherings of no more than three households are permitted in public parks or other outdoor spaces, but if there are other unrelated gatherings in the same park or outdoor space, mixing between groups is not allowed.
Anyone who is feeling sick with COVID-19 symptoms — fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, night sweats, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, tiredness, muscle or body aches, headaches, confusion, or loss of taste and smell — should obviously skip attending any gatherings this week.
Anyone who develops COVID-19 within 48 hours of attending a gathering should notify the organizer and/or other attendees as soon as possible.
The Sveums empathize with people who are struggling with what to do for Thanksgiving, and they hope others will choose caution as California and the United States continue setting new daily record numbers for confirmed cases of COVID-19 this week.
“I know a lot of people are having trouble with it,” Joe Sveum said Tuesday. “We’re all senior citizens, and we’d like to stay that way.”
The Sveums have a friend, Steve Weldon, who does a country music show on KAAD-LP 103.5 FM, the community radio based at The Dome, and sells Doc’s Dogs at the Chevron station on Stockton Road. Weldon posted to social media on Monday evening, “Our neighbor county, Stanislaus County has a COVID death rate of 17.8 percent for those over 65. If you love old folks, please wear a mask! Nuff said! Thanks from an old guy!”
The Sveums just hope this Thanksgiving is a blessing for everyone, especially for families coping with illness, and they urge people to get together virtually to share gratitude, the holiday spirit, and traditions, and to make good memories for all the youngsters. They have relatives as young as 11 and their early teens who will take part in their virtual Thanksgiving.
“It’s just a date on the calendar,” Kristin Sveum said. “This is no big deal. Just do it. We can figure out ways to do things together so everybody stays safe, and we don’t have to take the risks. We can still hang Christmas stockings together. We can play twister together on Zoom.
“You can create new traditions and have a lot of fun and you don’t have to sleep out the door. We as a family can create new, fun ways to make memories that will last a lifetime.”