Trick-or-treat date set for Centre Region. Here’s what to know about safety, changes
Trick or treat won’t happen on Halloween for the second consecutive year in five Centre Region municipalities.
The Centre Region Council of Governments voted in September to move the annual festivity to 6-8 p.m. Oct. 29 in State College, along with College, Ferguson, Harris and Patton townships.
Halfmoon Township is not included in the change. Nov. 1 was scheduled as a rain date.
COG did not rule out canceling trick or treat if needed because of the new coronavirus. A final decision is expected to be made the week of Oct. 19.
The adjustment was made because of a change in Penn State’s football schedule. The Nittany Lions were scheduled to play at Indiana on Oct. 31, but are now scheduled to play Ohio State at Beaver Stadium.
No fans are permitted as of Tuesday, but an influx of traffic and visitors is still expected throughout Happy Valley.
“Historically, for the safety of pedestrians — whether they’re trick-or-treaters or otherwise — we’ve found it’s best to move the trick-or-treat night off of the night of a home football game,” COG Executive Director Eric Norenberg said during a September meeting.
Trick or treat in the Centre Region was postponed in 2019 from Halloween to Nov. 2 due to inclement weather.
Is trick or treat safe?
Traditional trick-or-treating, where goodies are handed to children who go door to door, is considered a “higher risk” activity by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trunk-or-treat, indoor costume parties, indoor haunted houses and hayrides or tractor rides with people you don’t live with fall in the same category.
Grabbing individually wrapped bags that don’t require a hand-to-hand exchange is considered a “moderate risk” activity, just like ambling through pumpkin patches or orchards.
Pastimes with the lowest risk include carving pumpkins with family members or decorating your living space.
“Any activity that we did before the pandemic, we need to reevaluate and reconsider going forward. That holds for how we go grocery shopping and how we trick or treat,” Penn State’s Matthew Ferrari, a researcher in the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, said. “There’s nothing special about trick-or-treating that is fundamentally somehow more risky than something else. It’s just that everything we do needs to be revisited in the context of the new risks that we’re facing.”
Measuring COVID-19 risk largely boils down to four main factors: size, space, time and place. Some of those key benchmarks work in favor of trick or treat.
It’s an outdoor activity — that’s good. Interactions are generally short in duration — that’s good. And it’s an activity where everyone can wear a mask — that’s good.
It also could feature large groups of strangers interacting — that’s not ideal.
“Big Halloween parties? Not the right thing to do. Medium-sized Halloween parties? Still not the right thing to do,” Ferrari said. “Size is something that we really need to be paying attention to.”
In addition to mitigating the spread of COVID-19, there is also value in children and their families participating in memorable cultural experiences “so we don’t lose touch with ourselves and our community,” Ferrari said.
The decision ultimately ends up in the hands of each family, who know that just about everything has some level of risk.
“This question is going to keep coming up — is this thing safe to do? Is that thing safe to do? Can I participate in this holiday? It’s like Mad Libs. You can put in Halloween, a football game, a kid’s basketball game. And the answer for all of those is exactly the same,” Ferrari said. “Nothing we do now should be the same as we did last year; everything we do now should be different. And that doesn’t mean everything we do now should be bad. It just means that everything we do now we should take into account the situation that we’re in and the risks that we pose to ourselves and the risks that we pose to others.”
This story was originally published October 6, 2020 at 5:12 PM.