[Organizers] Re: Is it time to end COVID restrictions at most contra dances?

The other thing I'd like to investigate is the cause for the reduced attendance of younger dancers.  Is it true that requiring masks is reducing the proportion of younger dancers to the dance? In my recent experiences of organizing dances for the past decade or so, and also participating in many discussions on issues in social media, younger dancers have been more insistent on safety policies at dances that ensure their safety, including having anti-harassment policies that are well-defined and enforced.  And during the pandemic, it seems that of the people who have been more insistent in dances having good safety policies, it has been from the younger dancers.   As an organizer during the pandemic, we have received many complaints from angry dancers.  First, before we restarted, we got many emails and FB postings from many long-time dancers demanding we restart, even though at the time our board felt that it was not safe yet.  Later, when we decided to start under strict masking requirements, we then got dancers insisting that we make masking optional, emails that we still get.  By and large, they are from older, long-time dancers who do not want to wear a mask. It is true that the younger dancers have not appeared at our dances, but I don't think it's because of masking.  I can only speculate, but I think that younger dancers are actually still very covid-aware and perhaps haven't returned to dances because covid is still out there, and they don't feel comfortable even in masks.  They would feel even *less* comfortable without the masks, I believe.   I only speak for my area, but this is my experience.   As for the mask, if you are wearing a mask that lifts off your face on each breath, you're really not wearing a good mask.  Our dance does not allow surgical masks or cloth masks - we only require well-fitting N95 or KN95 masks that form the tight seal on the face when breathing both in and out.  Proper adjustment of the nosepiece can prevent glasses from fogging, and if you are wearing an N95, the straps really need to be in the right place (one high on the head, one low on the head) in order to get the right seal.  I often see people with both straps around the neck and you do not get the correct seal that way.  So you need to wear the correct mask AND wear it properly.  You don't need to tape it to your face for any seal, and if you need to do that, you're not wearing the correct mask.   Perry On Wednesday, January 4, 2023 at 09:19:58 PM EST, Joe Harrington via Organizers <organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: I appreciate the many very thoughtful replies!  I will make one more point, I think an important one that I should have made before, and then reply to some key points. I think that masking at contras is only effective on inhalation.  In an energetic contra, heavy breathing lifts the mask during exhalation.  Much/most of the air goes out around the mask, glasses get fogged, etc.  This is inevitable unless we tape the mask down, which I have never seen anyone do.  On inhaling, we suck the masks to our faces and get a good seal.  This means that, in contra, we protect ourselves with a mask, but not others from ourselves, even if others are protected by our own masks in other contexts. I won't buy a partial exhalation protection from breathing into a lifted mask: 50% fewer virus particles do not mean 50% less transmission. You're either above the threshold for a person's immune system or you're not. Those "bypass breaths" are a lot more volume than your sedentary breathing without a mask, and that transmits covid if you've got it. Yet, masks seem to work at contras.  I asked the question in another thread about mask effectiveness and it gave the answer I suspected: While events requiring vaccines and negative tests still have rampant spread (roughly 30% of vaccinated participants at two camps this summer got sick), NOBODY has reported spread while masking.  While we have not done before-and-after testing as in a rigorous study, we would certainly have noticed if there were events where 30% of the attendees got covid, because so many of us know each other at our local dances.  There are lots more weekly dances than camps, yet two camps had mass spread and no weeklies with masks have reported such.  For sure, there must be individual spread, and it would be hard to distinguish whether it came from contra or elsewhere.  But, I don't think that's important to do. This agrees with the experience in 2021 at Florida public universities, which was a much larger population and had more rigorous testing.  We were mandated to hold classes in person in spring 2021, before most people were vaccinated.  At my campus (UCF), we had in excess of 200,000 student visits to classrooms per week (35,000 students in face-to-face instruction, 3 classes per student, 2 meetings per class per week; both the latter two numbers are underestimated).  We had a very strong social pressure campaign to wear masks, and almost everyone did.  We tested and traced heavily.  We did not trace a single case to classroom transmission.  Conclusion: Masks work quite effectively. My conclusion is that NO requirements at dances make the air itself safe.  Vaccinated people still spread the virus in highly infectious quantities.  I claim that masked people do, too.  If we sealed our masks onto our faces with tape, we wouldn't, but nobody does that.  The safety we're getting is most likely coming from the protection we give ourselves by wearing a mask. Since we're not protecting others with our own masks, that means masking can be a choice.  Immunocompromised people and those who live with them can protect themselves and their loved ones by masking (IF they also mask reliably while out in society).  Those, like me, who have had long covid and who don't wish to go through it again can mask, and I do. Of course, there is always some risk. Vaccination can be a choice, for the same reason.  It doesn't protect one dancer from another; it protects the vaccinated person from hospitalization.  We can choose for ourselves whether we want to risk death if we get covid.  If hospital capacity is low, requiring masks and vaccines makes sense, if society is playing along. I'll cherry-pick some key points for response. This is the only argument presented that actually addressed my main point, namely that it is total behavior and risk that count, not just behavior at dances. If it's really the case that people in an area are masking up again, then dances there should, too, without question. I don't see 1 in 6 people in society masking.  It's more like 1 in 20, or even fewer.  That may be changing in some areas, at least temporarily; see above.  But, a personal mask is pretty good, though not perfect.  See further above. Many of the first respondents were Massachusetts dance organizers whose surveys said their attendees preferred requirements. I'm in full agreement! If your dancers want it, and you have the dancers you want, do what they want, especially if you're also getting new dancers. But, that isn't the case in much of the country (neither the agreement with restrictions nor the numbers dancing). Many dances require or strongly suggest a vaccine but not a mask.  This looks backward, from the perspective of preventing transmission. Masks prevent transmission more effectively than vaccines. Dancers can and have made their own decisions on whether to protect themselves from hospitalization with a vaccine.  I don't agree with the non-vaxing minority, but I'd rather dance with them than alienate them. I think it's a good time to be asking this, because it takes a little while to get used to a new idea, to discuss it within our communities, and to implement change.  I suggested reconsidering, not thoughtlessly scrapping. There are good short-term reasons to keep masking, the best one being that a community is masking outside of dancing, and thus dancing unmasked becomes most of their risk.  Two groups in the same town could fall on opposite sides of that line, and should have different policies. I was moved to start this thread when Don Veino asked (in another thread) whether recent infection could be used in lieu of a vaccine.  My thought is, sure, because neither one provides much protection against infection or spread.  People get reinfected within days if it's a different strain.  But then, why require vaccines at all?  Vaccines don't seem to protect anyone but the dancer, and that only from hospitalization, not infection.  I can come up with two answers: 1. To protect people from themselves, which has the side effect of banning anti-vaxers from dancing, and 2) To make people feel safe, even if there isn't really any added safety for you if the others are vaccinated or not.  I'd rather dance with the anti-vaxers than alienate them, even though I disagree with them.  Maybe especially because I do. We need more activities where politically opposed people see each other as ordinary, good people, and not as the enemy. Even in Massachusetts (where I'm from and where I dance as often as I can), behavior in society appears to be out of line with restrictions at dances (or at least did when I was there in mid-December), and this doesn't make medical sense to me. If you feel it's the organization's responsibility to protect dancers from each other, but not from themselves, and your dancers aren't demanding something different, then strongly encouraging vaccines and masks, and requiring masks when they're common in the region (or canceling altogether), makes sense to me.  Vax required but mask optional doesn't make sense to me, given the data from the summer camps. --jh-- On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 5:59 AM Perry Shafran <pshaf(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I have to question if now, this current moment, is the time to be asking this.  If you look at the current state of covid today, more than half our country has medium covid community level, which is a level that combines transmission and hospitalization.  That tells me that covid is spreading and causing people to go to hospitals at a significant amount. Covid is still a community disease and less an individual one.  Thus, it is really best treated at the community level, where we as organizers should provide the safest possible condition we can have to dance. Now, I needed to take public transportation in the DC area yesterday, and I would not say that it is "mostly maskless" - maybe around 50% masked, maybe fewer?  Still, i am definitely seeing more masks in public places than before the holidays. I also saw a meeting going on at my office where most in the room were wearing masks.   And also consider that even if crowded, most of society is not like contra, where you are breathing directly into everyone's faces and having them breathe directly into yours.  Thus if there is any place where universal masking is best, it's contra.   So, knowing that last year we had a huge spike in covid in January after the holiday gatherings, and that we are seeing a significant uptick now, my advice is to stay the course on requiring masks until the spring and reassess then.  That's learning from experience.  I empathize with those who don't want to wear a mask to dances, as I personally find it somewhat exhausting.  But I would rather not be responsible for spread of covid that could potentially harm someone else, so I feel we need to stay the course and continue requiring masks.   Perry Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 6:21 PM, Joe Harrington via Organizers<organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: While I'm happy to comply with any COVID policy in order to dance, and I choose to wear a mask at bigger events, I question whether the contra communities' strict policies are doing us much good, either in protecting us medically or in getting dances going again. Consider: 1. Even in the most restricted states (New England, etc.), nearly everyone is maskless nearly all the time in normal life, including most dancers. People eat in very crowded restaurants, ride public transportation, fly on airplanes, sit in airports, go shopping, work, attend school, do sports, go to the gym, sing, interact with friends and family members who have been out in the community maskless, etc., mostly without masks. 2. As a result of #1, covid is spreading quite effectively in our communities, even if a few groups are still masking. 3. As a result of #2, protocols at a dance cannot much alter community spread rates, even if the dance spread rate were zero. But, this isn't concerning most people because: 4. Vaccines do keep nearly every infected person out of the hospital and reduce long covid. 5. For those going to the hospital or suspected to be at risk, monoclonal and other treatments are quite effective. 6. As a result, the mortality of covid-19 is now down to three times that of a bad flu season, which is way down from the mass carnage of 2020. It is questionable what anything but masking is doing for us: 7. Unmasked contra dancing, even with a vaccine and negative test, does lead to rapid covid spread. Several camps in summer 2022 had 50+ infected dancers, even though they were all vaccinated and all had tested negative on arrival. The incubation period and false-negative rate are enough to allow one or two cases through, and the vaccine no longer keeps you from getting it, it just dramatically reduces severity. Since: 8. Even in the most conservative, vaccine-averse Southern communities, 90+% of contra dancers at big events say they are vaccinated (per survey at Summer Contradancers Delight Holiday in Tennessee). 9. Choosing to wear a mask remains an option for everyone, and is quite effective at keeping the wearer healthy, though it is not foolproof (but neither is life). And: 10. People have options for recreational and social activities, and many are choosing those with fewer or no restrictions, especially young people who don't have much personal risk from covid. 11. Essentially all other organized dance communities besides contra/English/etc. are dancing without restrictions on a national level, and have been since early 2022: Square, swing, blues, ballroom, salsa, tango, etc. It may therefore be time for communities to reconsider absolute restrictions, and instead encourage vaccination and mask-wearing as effective ways to stop the spread of diseases like covid, but also the flu, RSV, and other pathogens. People can still (and I do) choose to wear masks if they are concerned about getting covid. The idea of reducing spread at dances would be a good one if the rest of society were playing along. But, it isn't.  When I was a teen, I boycotted China. China didn't change. Communities with a large component of at-risk dancers who mask in general life and who are vaccinated may wish to continue requiring vax+mask.  In areas with many dancers, two dances, one requiring masks and one mask-optional, may make the most sense. I am especially concerned at the reduced percentage of younger dancers I have seen at recent events. While it seemed, prepandemic, that there was a nascent resurgence in the popularity of contra among the current twentysomethings, few of the young dancers I used to see are showing up to dances post-covid. When I go to swing and blues, there are lots of younger dancers.  I am certain that if we required masks at my college contra dance, students would just go to ballroom, salsa, or swing. If we want to get contra going again, and especially if we want to attract many new younger dancers, who are not worried that getting covid represents a big risk to them and who have plenty of unrestricted options in recreational activities, perhaps it's time not to ask, "does this policy stop covid from transmitting at our dance," but rather, "does this policy significantly lower the total covid risk our dancers face?" I argue that strict policies no longer do that, given our behavior in society.  Nonetheless, those of us who are concerned can still choose to reduce our own risk substantially by being vaccinated and wearing a well-fitting KN95 or better mask whenever we are in a crowd, including at dances, without requiring it of others.  I do. Thanks, --jh-- Joe Harrington Organizer, Greater Orlando Contra Dance Faculty Advisor, Contra Knights, the UCF contra dancing club contraknights.org FB, Ig: Contra Knights contradancerjoe(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ Organizers mailing list -- organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-leave(a)lists.sharedweight.net _______________________________________________ Organizers mailing list -- organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net To unsubscribe send an email to organizers-leave(a)lists.sharedweight.net