Cancel Your 2020 Holiday Plans Today

by Robert McGarvey

Just do it: decide that this year’s December festivities – Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever you wish to celebrate with gatherings of family and friends – is a no go in 2020, a kind of unawares suicide mission.

The CDC is not mincing words in its advice. “The best thing for Americans to do during the holiday season is to stay at home and not travel,” said Dr. Henry Walke, who is in charge of day to day management of the response to the pandemic.

That could not be plainer. Stay home.

But my additional advice is this: cancel big family 2020 holiday get togethers but make firm – and glorious – plans for a huge December 2021 celebration.

2020 is a bust. But 2021 is a different, cheerier reality.

Still, we have to start with this blunt truth: this December offers no basis for partying in groups.

We missed that message in November and now we are paying the price.

Some 9.4 million of us passed through TSA airport screening over the 10 days of Thanksgiving season. Yes, that volume is way down from 2019 when a record 2.9 million of us were screened on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and just 1.17 million were screened on that day this year.

But our travel numbers were way too high for a nation fighting a losing battle with a pandemic.

So now the virus surges. As experts knew it would.

As the Mississippi Free Press headline trumpeted: “After Big Thanksgiving Dinners, Plan Small Christmas Funerals, Health Experts Warn.”

White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx told CBS, “We know people may have made mistakes … over the Thanksgiving time period. If your family traveled, you have to assume that you are exposed and you became infected and you really need to get tested in the next week.”

Right now, 13.8 million of us are known to have had the disease. 271,000 of us have died with more than 2500 new deaths daily. The death total likely will be near 350,000 by the end of December.

It may eclipse 400,000 by Inauguration Day.

We are in a killing season. In Arizona, hospitals admit they are scrambling to try to cope with surging Covid-19 cases. “The number one limiting factor is staffing right now,” Ann-Marie Alameddin, president and CEO of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, told the Arizona Republic. “It’s a much tighter supply because the whole country is in need of the same skill set.”

In New York, the state is implementing “emergency” hospital measures to try to keep pace with Covid-19 cases.

In California the alert is out that ICUs may soon be “overwhelmed.”

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has declared “it’s time to cancel everything.”

What we don’t need is a surge in cases triggered by December holiday festivities.

And we also don’t need a wave of cases triggered by so-called Covid fatigue where some of us seemingly have tired of masks and social distancing.

And yet, where I live in central Phoenix, ever more people seem determined to exercise an erroneously claimed “right” not to wear a mask.

As Helena Rosenblatt, a history professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote in a Washington Post piece, “Do individuals have a constitutional right not to wear masks? They do not.

“Are such mandates undermining American democratic government? They are not.”

And similarly there are those who insist they have a Constitutional right to celebrate their holidays as they wish.

But I have every right to steer clear of them and I will exercise my right.

It’s not just the United States that is grappling with this problem. Across Europe, the alarms are ringing that bustling family holiday gatherings will represent a risk not just to the immediate attendees but to their communities. This is a highly infectious disease.

In Belgium, the prime minister even invokes a stark and graphic metaphor. Leave empty chairs around the dining table this year or risk having permanently empty chairs in years to come.

That is a gruesome image. But it also is relevant because the pandemic has regained velocity in much of the US and in parts of Europe.

That is why we are in for sedate, subdued, low key holiday festivities. There is no other sanity in our present moment.

But think of the bright side – 2021 is coming and with it a vaccine that may be “widely available” by mid year and will probably be in every arm in the US that wants it by Q4.

Which puts us squarely in the holiday season.

Tell me that you are planning a holiday 2020 blowout and I will tell you it is a terrible idea.

But tell me you are planning a 2021 celebration that may be your life’s best and I will ask for an invite.

That’s a celebration we will all deserve because we will have been through so much getting there and when we do get there, a year from now, it’s time to pop the good champagne and yell a merry cheers. I know I will.