Masks at Thanksgiving? Here are better ideas!

Thanksgiving 2021 should be the reward for abstaining from 2020 celebrations until Covid-19 vaccines rolled out. Why not? The virus is still very much around, but times really have changed.
Remember those 11th-hour pleas from the US Centers for Disease Control to cancel last year’s gatherings as a big fall surge was building? They were reasonable, then: Big holiday celebrations pose some of the worst risks of viral transmission, with lots of people mixing in badly ventilated houses for long periods of time. And here we are again. Cases are up in some states. But vaccines have arrived. Imperfect though the vaccines are, they’re plenty good enough to justify adopting a new strategy to avoid making this Thanksgiving another festival of confusion and stress.
Call it harm reduction, a term used during the AIDS epidemic to describe ways to help people have love and relationships while reducing the risk of spreading a menacing virus. It worked because people need relationships. Essential human connections are at stake.
Harm reduction can’t just mean masks, which simply don’t work at dinner parties. Masks interfere with people’s ability to hear, to be heard, to feel connected, and to eat. It’s futile to urge their use at the holiday table.
What are the experts doing? In a survey published by STATnews, epidemiologists and other experts were divided. A little over half said they’d host or attend a multigenerational Thanksgiving dinner. But 16 out of 28 said they’d advise elderly relatives to steer clear.
The answers say little about the safety of holiday gatherings and a lot about whether family functions are important to the epidemiologists surveyed. And the thought of excluding elderly relatives just seems mean. A harm-reduction approach would look at who is most vulnerable and consider what would minimise their risk while allowing one and all to enjoy the human connections that most people need.
Anyone can get severely ill from Covid-19, but for younger, healthy, vaccinated people, the risk is down in the same range as flu and other common infections that don’t warrant turning life upside down or skipping holidays. Older people, people who’ve had cancer or organ transplants, or those on immune-suppressing drugs are at more risk, so let’s focus attention on how to help them be safer. Many of us cherish those people the most. We know we don’t have them forever.
One way to reduce risk is to open windows during Thanksgiving dinner. That might require turning up the heat. It’s worth the extra fuel and cost. Going outdoors for dinner is great for people in the parts of Florida or Louisiana where the evenings are still warm and cases are still low.

—Bloomberg