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.
> 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.
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.
> 1 in 6 immunocompromised
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.
> Under the business maxim that it's far cheaper/ easier to keep an
existing customer than obtain a new one, my simplified perspective is:
what does your community want?
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 have to question if now, this current moment, is the time to be asking this. .... 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 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--