With holidays, vacations, and travel being put on hold due to COVID-19, it’s not easy to stay optimistic for upcoming holidays such as Halloween. However, with a few more precautions, Halloween can be safely celebrated this year. In fact, you can still participate without contributing to potential risk of COVID-19 outbreaks.
Although Halloween will not be exactly the same, Halloween decorations cause no harm. People can show their Halloween spirit by decorating their porch, yard, the interior of their houses, or carving pumpkins. Other low risk activities include having costume competitions with your family or having virtual costume competitions. Safe alternatives to going out include curling up and watching some classic horror movies or having a scavenger hunt for candy within your own household.
Going on a scavenger hunt for Halloween related items can be a more outdoorsy Halloween activity for children. Children must socially distance during these scavenger hunts and incorporate a proper mask in their costumes. The CDC recommends leaving the porch lights off on Halloween to discourage trick-or-treaters; if handing out candy, use lined up individual goody bags outside the door. However, this does come with a little more risk as you can’t completely trust unsupervised children to practice social distancing. Before preparing these goody bags, make sure to wash hands thoroughly with warm soap and water.
Halloween enthusiasts willing to take the necessary precautions can visit pumpkin patches, go to outdoor horror forests or corn fields while social distancing, or have an outdoor Halloween movie or costume showing with family or friends while taking care to social distance. If there will be screaming or yelling involved in any of these activities, people should be spaced at a greater distance.
As advised by Johns Hopkins Medicine, certain activities remain absolutely forbidden. For example, traditional trick-or-treating or “trunk- or-treating” should be avoided. Handing out candy from the trunks of cars in parking lots does not lessen the risk of trick-or-treating. Crowded indoor Halloween or costume parties should be avoided. Indoor haunted houses involve risk due to close proximity and screaming. Traveling outside local communities can’t be recommended. Tractor rides outside your family can be unsafe; activities such as apple bobbing, exchanging candy, and Halloween party games outside your family can increase the spread of COVID-19.
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