The Halloween decorating stared early this year, barely after Labor Day. Yard after yard in my town started to sport crepe, black wreaths, 10-foot high (!) skeletons, grim reapers, pumpkins and orange lights galore. One yard had a 15-foot long inflatable black cat hissing and spitting its displeasure into the street. And tonight, of course, the trick-or-treaters, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm as per city guidelines.
You’d think that this might have been the year when scaring we peasants with pretend death and ghoulishness would take a break. After all, our nation has suffered at least 743,000 deaths since the COVID pandemic hit the US in early 2020. We are still seeing over 86,000 new cases a day. 60,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID, 18,000 of them in intensive care.
So why all the celebration?
It might be as simple as the fact that trick or treating didn’t happen last year. That resulted in a pent-up demand for ghoulishness and gluttony this year. Some parents also fretted that with Halloween T&T, kids were missing out on an important part of the experience of childhood. I don’t know. As a kid who was born just a couple of years after polio was deafened in the US, not having to live in an iron lung was a plenty fine experience.
Then there’s COVID fatigue. We have been dealing with the virus for the better part of two years, not to mention the intense and ongoing public debate about it. You can’t watch the news without hearing some irate parent yelling at a school board member about mask mandates, some nurse getting canned for refusing he vaccine, or some pundit making wild and inaccurate claims about the virus’s origin and lethality. What should be an easy-peasey decision about using modern science to protect ourselves from disease has made every opportunity for conversation into a stomach-churning, sphincter-tightening morass of evasion and anxiety. COVID has joined religion, sex and politics on the list of standard topics to avoid in polite company.
No wonder people want to let loose.
Luckily, in spite of all the hoopla around the vaccine and mandates to obtain it, things are settling down. More than 58% of the country has been fully vaccinated, with that figure nearing or surpassing 70% in science-friendly states like mine. (It’s interesting that Guam and Puerto Rico head the list of vaccinated states and territories!) Deaths and hospitalizations due to the Delta variant are on the wane. It seems we will eventually reach the 80% herd immunity level, where even the biggest COVID deniers will have some protection from the virus.
Which brings me back to this year’s Halloween decorating. Most of us have dodged the death bullet, thanks to masking, social distancing and the unsung wonders of mRNA research. No doubt, some feel they can let down their guard and laugh at Death, our oldest enemy and most relentless enemy. But I wonder if thumbing our nose at the Grim Reaper is such a great strategy. The anti-science, pro-individual-freedom, anti-authority stance of up to half of our citizens survived the pandemic along with COVID. Sure, this time we managed to spin up a vaccine while millions of citizens, including half of our national leaders, scoffed at the virus it was targeting. This time we mostly went along (with a little nudging from our workplaces) with getting the jab that saved our lives and our lungs. I just wonder how many more times we can withstand the simultaneous shocks of a lethal virus, ignorance, selfishness and the politicization of medicine.
Rather than parading those ghosts and ghouls them on Main Street, it might be better to herd them back into the crypt. It might be fun to hobnob with Death on one night at the end of October, as the seasons change and the veil thins between us and the spectral world. But Death makes a horrid dinner guest the rest of the year.