Blue Tip Festival COVID-19 Update
For 47 years, the Blue Tip Festival has been a tradition in the City of Wadsworth. A huge part of the celebration is the Blue Tip Parade. Every year the street is lined with citizens, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to see the bands, the floats, and what treats end up in their goody bags. The parade is a celebration of Wadsworth. It is an opportunity for local businesses to give back to the community that supports them, for politicians to see the constituency, and a chance for neighbors to come together for a common celebration of community. It is a beloved and important event and I take its stewardship very seriously.
As we pass the first of May, we are usually at the beginning of the end of the parade preparation. Typically we will have almost 100 entries to the parade waiting to be put in the lineup order, however today we have only 38. We normally have our sponsors, and volunteers for the parade locked down, but now we have most taking the same “wait and see” approach which we have been taking with all our life decisions in these strange times. I do not blame anyone for not committing. The uncertainty of what the landscape will look like in one month makes it difficult if not impossible to know what position we will find ourselves.
We have been waiting for answers to reveal themselves, but we have to come to the realization that they may not. The best historical lesson I could find was the story of the Liberty Loan Parade of 1918. The City of Philadelphia held a parade in September of 1918 to celebrate the return of our troops from their fighting in the First World War. Earlier in the spring, the Spanish Flu had found its way to the United States from Europe with our returning soldiers. In part because of the low number of cases in Philadelphia, the Liberty Loan Parade went forward as scheduled. Within a week of the parade, there were over six hundred new cases of the deadly virus. Within six months, 16,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.
The hard truth is that having a low number of cases is not a sound reason to allow mass gatherings like the Blue Tip Parade to proceed. In fact, it is quite the opposite. When you have low numbers of people infected with a virus as communicable as Covid-19, not having mass gatherings is most important. That is the time when numbers can be controlled and the spread contained. As Philadelphia found out 100 years ago, once you have exceeded a critical number of infected, the bell cannot be unrung.
For those reasons, there will not be a Blue Tip Parade in 2020. But I would remind everyone that the reasons we have the parade are still here. We still have a vibrant community that takes care of each other and who are proud of what we stand for. This year we will continue to celebrate us coming together as a community. This year however, we do it by staying at home.
