A: Will you go back to your hometown for the coming Spring Festival?

B: Certainly I want to go back and visit my parents, but the newly discovered cases of COVID-19 in our city have cast a pall over the prospects.

Note: This idiom means “to cause something to become sad or somber, to darken or tarnish something.” A pall is cloth spread over a coffin, hearse or tomb. By the 18th century the term had been transferred to spiritual darkness.