Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates

Should I Hold Thanksgiving During Covid?

Five Data-Driven Ideas to Help You Decide

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Thanksgiving this year in our Age of Covid is not just a meal, it needs to be a science-based data-driven carefully-calculated risk proposition made in the context of rising cases and hospitalizations in most of the country.

Here’s a big thing we’ve learned in the 2020 Giant Science Fair of Covid: eating inside unmasked is one of the riskiest things we can do. Why?

Because meals are where you take off your mask and talk for prolonged periods.

You take off your mask to eat, to drink, to sip. You share a meal to talk, tell secrets, announce, argue, gossip, flirt, yell, convince, and chat and chat and chat.

And what do you do at Thanksgiving? All of the above.

And who do you do it with? People you love who gather from far and wide to cook in the kitchen and fight over the Xbox and eat for hours and tackle each other in the yard and tickle on the couch and laugh out loud with the kids and yell at the football game on the television. All risky business, I’m sad to say.

So basically Thanksgiving is like “The Children’s Illustrated Guide To A Super Spreader Event.”