Christmas in covid - How to celebrate Christmas in 2020

 

 

Christmas without Christmas dinners

e have learned that nothing will be as before because of the coronavirus with hard lessons. In addition to the tens of thousands of deaths, Covid-19 wiped out has almost 20% of our GDP, left us without parties in towns and cities throughout Spain, took away football and concerts and condemned us to use of the mask; But the virus that stole our joy has not yet taken its most painful bill: Christmas .

christmas in covid

The epidemiological situation that we have in the second week of December will determine how we will celebrate the holidays, but experts are clear that the most familiar parties will be greatly diminished. We can forget about massive events such as horseback riding and other traditional ones such as company dinners. Some experts even point to Christmas as the best time to live a total confinement to face the entry into winter in better conditions.

Some experts even point to Christmas as the best time to experience total confinement.

This is the opinion of Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine and Practice at the University of Oxford, who in statements to the Sky channel assured that it is the best time to do a confinement, because "winter is very long." In Spain it has been Margarita del Val who has told us that Christmas will not be so sweet. In an interview on Cadena Ser, the prestigious CSIC researcher made it clear that the coronavirus will mark the holidays and that we will not be able to enjoy massive party favors.

An unnecessary bomb:

Christmas "brings together all the worst things that can be done in a pandemic," says Salvador Peiró, researcher in Public Health at the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research of the Valencian Community (FISABIO). Mobility, both from abroad and between regions or even from urban to rural areas of a province and family gatherings with parents and grandparents in closed spaces where people sing, laugh and shout are the ingredients that make Christmas into " the pump that is not needed ”, explains Peiró.

The combination is completed with parties in nightclubs and the group of young people during the holiday period. "All this supposes a high probability of outbreaks, especially if the initial incidence is high, and a lot of risk for the elderly", points out the Valencian researcher.

Much of how Christmas is going to be will depend a lot on what we do in the coming weeks.

With just three months to go until Christmas Eve, the room for improvement is still possible. “Lleida had it very bad in July, but after two months working it has a lower incidence than the regions of Catalonia. In Madrid, or wherever, you can achieve the same, but you have to do things very well and in more cases it is always more complicated ”, says Joan Caylà, from the Barcelona Tuberculosis Research Unit (FUITB). For this epidemiologist “the control of these infections is appreciated, if it is done well it improves, but it must be done well. You need a lot of awareness of the population, that there is part that is not very aware and, sometimes, of some politicians ”.

"A large part of how Christmas is going to be will depend a lot on what we do in the coming weeks, especially in political terms of disease control, if we double the transmission and we get to December with the lowest transmission possible we will have a slightly happier Christmas ”, affirms epidemiologist Pedro Gullón.

Don't come home

According to Gullón, Christmas will be accompanied by a series of restrictions and security measures such as gathering as few people as possible under one roof in smaller meetings or wearing a mask except when we are not eating. If the situation is very bad, travel between provinces can be limited, and we may have to combine it with some digital medium, video call or similar. Maybe we can get together with some family members on the 24th and others on the 25th and if things are very bad we may not be able to get together because things are very serious.

The incidence of the virus - the number of cases per inhabitant - in mid-December will be key in determining how Christmas can be lived. For Peiró, not even the areas with the lowest current incidence (Valencian Community, Galicia or the Canary Islands) have acceptable numbers for the celebration of the festivals, with about 50 weekly cases per 100,000 inhabitants. With the epidemiological situation in Madrid, family reunions are limited to 6 people, but in the Valencian Community, in a better epidemiological situation, they are limited to 10.

“The reasonable thing would be to arrive with the incidence with which we left the confinement, of 10 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Under these conditions it is relatively difficult to come across someone who infects you and would justify more lax measures. "If we take it seriously now, with restrictive measures, we could do well in the coming weeks and reach that moment in better conditions, but we need to act now," says Peiró.

In any case, the Fisabio researcher is clear about it. These Christmases will necessarily be marked by social distance, as much as possible inside the home and avoiding too much interaction with the elderly.

Christmas is already at stake

Joan Caylá maintains that “If the quarantines are met, we will go well, and if the control programs were good, Christmas would be fantastic. In Wuhan they have been very hard, but they have controlled it, if we did it well we could be better than now, but if we do not do it well, between the winter period, the flu and the fact that people are indoors, we will be worse than now " .

The later the measures are taken, more and longer will have to be taken ”.

For his part, Gullón insists that we are playing Christmas now: “we would have to have a very, very good situation to have a Christmas without restrictions, it is true that we can reach a good enough situation to be able to have meetings of ten people, but let's go to arrive with restrictions, the later the measures are taken, the more will have to be taken and for a longer time”, affirms the epidemiologist.

2020 will end with the corona virus still with us and, hopefully, in 2021 we will see how it disappears. “We have Covid in principle for a long year, we have had a first important wave, we are going to have a second wave, also important but less, and probably, we will have to see it, a third somewhat less important. But as long as there is no effective vaccine with wide vaccination coverage, it will continue to be a risk,