QuickTidal, on 04 September 2020 - 09:14 PM, said:
I thought the consensus was that Halloween...a night when tonnes of kids go from random house to random house and are given multiple packages of candy from strangers...or people dress up and get slovenly drunk at parties indoors with strangers...was off for 2020.
Seems like a COVID vector petrie dish in the offing...but maybe that's just me?
We are planning to buy some candy for the kiddos and hide it around our place for them to dress up and go find, and then watch a Halloween kids flick.
'US holidays during Covid: yes to trick-or-treating, no to Santa mall photos
For epidemiologists, nothing is more scary about Halloween this year than the idea of huge groups of people congregating in the same small area.
Costume parties thrown by adults come with big risks, but there is some hope for children looking to trick-or-treat this year.
"Trick-or-treating is something that can still go on and happen safely with just a few measures in place," said Sandra Albrecht, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University.
To mitigate potential spread, trick-or-treaters will have to stay in as small of groups as possible with fewer adults supervising than usual. Everyone giving and taking candy should be wearing masks that cover their nose and mouths.
Though health experts are less concerned about the virus spreading by the handling of candy, treat-givers should consider distributing goodies with tongs or grabbers, or even consider finding a creative way to toss candy at trick-or-treaters. One epidemiologist with Dear Pandemic, a Covid safety advice effort on social media, said she is planning on dressing up as a pageant queen, throwing candy off a home-made parade float in her yard'
https://www.theguard...-coronavirus-us
Have some sort of horrifying undead(-or-whatever-)scarecrow-like figure with guts stuffed with treats that spray down (controlledly enough) when you push from the other side?...
Around the beginning of lockdown, I thought Halloween might be the one holiday that would be okay, provided people wear masks. In retrospect, since airborn transmission seems to be a major issue, wearing a mask *over* an even marginally effective mask could make it even more difficult to breathe... with the exception of Halloween masks that would themselves be effective. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to make Halloween masks that are highly effective against airborn transmission, particularly if people are willing to spend a bit more and lug around more of a costume. (Lots of Darth Vaders and other cyborgs this year?...)
Odds of mass vaccination by October's ending seem to be pretty much nil by now.
Trump would probably want to time mass mobilization of his 'vaccine' to be right before the election... assuming his followers are gullible enough to use it (and 'Heaven' no doubt) as a rationalization for risking death (or prolonged sickness...).
'What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear From COVID-19
The White House's new science adviser says: nothing. The science disagrees.
[...] When you multiply the hospitalization rate for 30-something men (about 1.2 percent) by the chronic-illness rate of hospitalized patients (almost 90 percent), you get about 1 percent. That means a guy my age has one-in-100 chance of developing a long-term illness after contracting COVID-19. For context, the estimated infection-fatality rate for somebody in their 60s is 0.7 percent, according to the same study in Science.
You might be used to thinking of 30-somethings as safe and seniors as at risk in this pandemic. But if a man in his 30s and a man in his 60s both contract COVID-19, it is more likely that the 30-something will develop a months-long illness than that the 60-something will die, according to this research. (The calculation above doesn't even include the countless long-haulers who never went to the hospital.)
More frightening than what we're learning now is what we cannot yet know: the truly long-term—as in, decades-long—implications of this disease for the body. "We know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, we know that human papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, we know that HIV leads to certain cancers," Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale, told James Hamblin and Katherine Wells of The Atlantic. "We have no idea whether having had this infection means that, 10 years from now, you have an elevated risk of lymphoma."'
https://www.theatlan...ovid-19/616087/
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 07 September 2020 - 05:27 PM