The Yard Crawl Committee has made the decision to cancel this year's Yard Crawl due to circumstances beyond our control with this pandemic. After many discussions with the Health Department we feel this is the best direction for your health and safety and the safety and health of the community.

Yard Crawl Sponsors received the following recommendation from the Virginia Department of Health:

"I recommend in the strongest terms that the Route 11 Yard Crawl be cancelled this year, or at least postponed until next spring, when we hope to have a vaccine against COVID-19.

COVID-19 is a disease of proximity that is deadly to the elderly. It is spread by respiratory droplets from coughing, sneezing, singing, talking, or just exhaling, by an infected person. The droplets are either inhaled or picked up from a surface by another person who becomes infected. The risk of infection increases with closeness and length of contact, as well as the number of contacts. Further, because contagion starts well before symptoms, it is easy to spread the disease without knowing you have it. Finally, COVID-19 can be deadly to persons over the age of 60, with up to a 20% fatality rate for those over 80.

The nature of the Yard Crawl, with 43 miles of yard sales and flea markets, creates a situation where a person might easily come in contact with hundreds of others in a day. Combined with the low likelihood of good compliance with masking and social distancing in that environment, and the repeated picking up and handling of items by multiple people, the level of interpersonal contact sets up the risk for rapid and multiple spread of COVID-19, on the level recently seen at the beaches. Add to this the number of older people likely to participate in the Yard Crawl, and the known presence of COVID-19 in both Shenandoah and Frederick Counties, we could find ourselves facing a catastrophic deadly outbreak in the Valley.

I understand the significant economic impact of this recommendation, and have no desire for further harm to the local economy. Individual yard sales spread out over several weekends and not present in clusters or adjacent to one another, might be safely conducted (with masking, hand sanitizer, and distancing where people are in groups), but I recommend there be no formal "yard sale days" in communities in the Valley at this time. Especially in the case of the Yard Crawl, I believe that the risk of the rapid spread of a potentially deadly disease overrides the economic effect." Lord Fairfax Health District, Virginia Department of Health