{"id":90306,"date":"2020-10-16T01:03:26","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T22:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/kids-have-lost-so-much-dont-take-halloween-too\/"},"modified":"2020-10-16T01:03:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T22:03:26","slug":"kids-have-lost-so-much-dont-take-halloween-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/kids-have-lost-so-much-dont-take-halloween-too\/","title":{"rendered":"#Kids have lost so much. Don’t take Halloween too."},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Kids have lost so much. Don’t take Halloween too.<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Over the summer, the phrase \u201crisk budget\u201d entered my personal lexicon and lodged in my brain, based on this very smart New York Times<\/em> piece<\/a> about how to cautiously navigate a COVID-19 world where things were starting to open up again. The gist is that we should think of the risks we each take as a cumulative bucket\u2014which means making room for the risks that accompany the things that matter most to us or impart the most benefit, and skipping things that don\u2019t matter as much, or which carry a risk that is simply too high.<\/p>\n

The writer compares it to Weight Watchers points: you save up for the treats you want the most.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s useful about this framework\u00a0 is that it takes into account both sides of the scale: the cost of an activity, gathering or outing in terms of its risk, and the benefit we derive from the thing.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Halloween and trick-or-treating. Specifically (for now) in Ottawa, because our lovely city is always an Olympic-calibre overachiever when it comes to anything bureaucratic and peevish. But this issue is going to pop up in a lot of places over the next week or two.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam, said earlier this week that there was no need to kibosh Halloween, when a little creativity could easily make it pandemic-safe. \u201cI think finding that balance of trying to provide some degree of normality, even though it is actually different from any other year, most public health leaders think that that is actually important,\u201d she said in a briefing on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Tam suggested using different fabrics to incorporate face masks into kids\u2019 costumes and handing out pre-packaged candy at the end of a hockey stick\u2014see, Tim Hortons? There\u2019s your next gauzy Canadiana commercial, even in the midst of our current dystopian hellscape\u2014as simple safety measures.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are ways to actually manage this outdoors,\u201d she said, before adding a caveat: \u201cYou should listen to your local public health direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereupon Ottawa\u2019s chief public health officer said: Nope.<\/p>\n

\u201cHalloween needs to be different this year,\u201d Vera Etches told Ottawa city council in recommending against trick-or-treating, the day after Tam made her remarks. Etches cited Ottawa\u2019s worrying level of COVID-19 cases, which give the city the unhapp<\/a>y distinction of having the highest rate of infection per population in the province, as reason for extreme caution.<\/p>\n

Mayor Jim Watson said police and bylaw officers would not be out searching for tiny ghouls and goblins to ticket\u2014and if that sounds insane, please recall that this is the city that shut down<\/a> a lemonade stand run by a seven-year-old and her five-year-old sister because they did not have a permit\u2014but city leadership was strongly recommending that families cancel trick-or-treating. He would not be giving out candy at his own house, Watson added.<\/p>\n

Long before we arrived at October, here is a short and extremely incomplete list of the daily joys, special rituals, ordinary structure and fun children across Canada and around the world have missed out on: birthday parties, playgrounds, sports, dance recitals, skating lessons, swimming, borrowing books from the library, seeing their friends in the flesh, learning at school in any normal sense of the term, time with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and everyone else who would normally populate their family\u2019s village, fireworks and pizza days. And on top of that, they have had to learn things about the world that cause them to reflexively step back every time someone passes them on the sidewalk.<\/p>\n

Any parent can tell you about the deep, refracted, existential misery they have seen in their kids as a result of all of these losses. The only thing more heartbreaking than that suffering might be the cheerful, stalwart \u201cOkay, sure, this is just what we do now\u201d adaptability children have also demonstrated, seamlessly incorporating hand sanitizer and mask-enforcement into their narrative when they play store or restaurant.<\/p>\n

The cost side of the ledger if we cancel Halloween is heavy, adding yet another loss to a 2020 calendar that looks like one continuous smear of grey disappointment from March forward, and shows no signs of brightening up. And prim, anodyne public health messages informing us that carving a pumpkin with your family or watching a spooky movie on your couch are much safer and gosh, just as fun as trick-or-treating suggest that certain adults have forgotten not only their childhoods but their sense of decency, too.<\/p>\n

And what are we trading the missing joy of that screeching, sugar-fuelled, iconic night for, in terms of the risks we would supposedly be mitigating?<\/p>\n

Trick-or-treating contains most of the exact same elements that public health authorities have been telling us for months add up to substantially lower risk of transmission of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an outdoor activity where it would be relatively easy for people to travel<\/a> in household groups and space themselves out from other households. Close contact would be glancing at best, because have you ever seen children stand still on Halloween? The COVID Alert app that the federal government is promoting as a key tool for tracing and case management is only triggered if you are less than six feet from someone for 15 minutes. The notices we get from public health to alert us to a COVID case in our children\u2019s schools offer reassurance by explaining that \u201cbriefly coming within 2 metres of someone, such as walking past them in a hallway or on a sidewalk, is not close contact.\u201d Neither of those risk thresholds look anything like the reality of trick-or-treating.<\/p>\n

As Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics, put it in a Times<\/em> op-ed after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States issued an official edict against it, \u201c\u2026If I had to design an activity for children that might be safe during a pandemic, I\u2019m not sure that I could do a better job than trick-or-treating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lingering issues could be addressed with a little ingenuity and effort.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re worried about the sort of small, crowded neighbourhoods that get mobbed on Halloween night, extend the hours of trick-or-treating\u2014Halloween is on a Saturday, which is perhaps the only break any of us have gotten from the universe in this hideous year\u2014and stagger kids by age or even and odd house numbers. Array treats on front steps or a large tray so no one is pawing through a bowl or standing in close proximity to an open door. Buy some extra candies your kids can hoover up on Halloween night and quarantine the rest of their treats for a few days or wipe down the packages if you\u2019re worried about contamination. Mark a path on lawns where kids can wait their turn; believe me, they\u2019re all used to it by now, they won\u2019t even blink.<\/p>\n

With a minimal amount of creativity and good sense, trick-or-treating could look exactly like adults queuing up to grab takeout. Public health experts have been telling us for months that\u2019s a perfectly safe thing to do, while political leaders have outright exhorted us to do so as often as possible in order to keep our local economies from imploding completely.<\/p>\n

Why would we not try just as hard to make Halloween work, and be just as courageous and reasonable about the small amount of risk involved and what we will gain in exchange for it?<\/p>\n

Once again, it\u2019s tough to escape the feeling that as a society, we will deploy enormous imagination and resources to make things happen in new ways when profit is on the line, but when what\u2019s hanging in the balance is joy, comfort and normalcy for kids, we collectively shrug our shoulders and shut it all down just to be safe.
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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Kids have lost so much. Don’t take Halloween too.” Over the summer, the phrase \u201crisk budget\u201d entered my personal lexicon and lodged in my brain, based on this very smart New York Times piece about how to cautiously navigate a COVID-19 world where things were starting to open up again. The gist is that we…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/CP14648027-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1356,67806,5036,67805,75963],"class_list":["post-90306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-covid-19","tag-editors-picks","tag-halloween","tag-ottawa","tag-trick-or-treating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}