Seth asked: I’m curious to hear if you are starting to book callers for your fall and winter dances… Are you booking in hopes that COVID-19 has somehow been resolved? Are you waiting longer?
It seems to me that it is going to be a while before we can safely have contra dances, given the close proximity to every one and the heavy breathing. Do we have to wait for a vaccine? And I reply: I'm a caller, a series programmer, and chair of our local SF Bay Area CDS affiliate, which ordinarily runs 14 series (contra, English, teen, etc). Organization-wide, we instructed all series programmers not to book July-September and canceled any pre-existing bookings (offering to pay the staff the guarantees they would have gotten if the event happened). We've been working on grants and fee-for-service projects to get our freelance musicians some income and plan to keep that up, and online events with tip jars (waltz concerts, tune lessons) to keep furthering our mission and to give the musicians support. We haven't made a formal statement about the Oct-Dec quarter, and we haven't yet canceled our English dance weekend scheduled for November, but I'm pretty sure we'll have to, and I'm pretty sre Our position in the Bay Area is that we have a *lot* of local talent, both callers and musicians. If a contra dance started looking like a good idea to us as organizers and to the halls we use, we think we could pull a pretty good one together on very little notice. It's way better for morale, I think, to be ready to put one together if its possible than to fill a calendar full of things we'll most likely have to cancel, and to bend our efforts towards things we *can* do - including online English and contra events. I am myself immunodeficient, diabetic, and 60, so I'm likely to get COVID-19 if exposed and with a co-morbidity, wouldn't count on doing well with it, so I'm pretty cautious. (Not "never go outside and have all the groceries delivered" cautious, but "avoid any situation where I can't maintain social distancing and wear a mask indoors" cautious.) Contra ticks all the boxes for a hazardous activity: usually indoors and usually without HEPA-filtered fresh air, exertion requiring heavy breathing, difficult to do masked, can't maintain social distance, keep touching sweaty people, etc. What it would take for me to go safely to a contradance is knowing that I can't get it (effective, widely distributed vaccine, or that I've had it and am immune [requires definitive answer on how much immunity antibodies provide and for how long, effective testing with no false negatives], or knowing that nobody else in the room has it and is shedding virus [and only 9 out of 10 people who have it spike a fever, so temperature sensors are not good enough]; we need quick / reliable / cheap tests that can identify asymptomatic virus spreaders and if they're not 100% reliable produce false positives rather than false negatives, or finally that if I do get it there'll be a reliable and effective treatment available. Society as a whole can get by without a vaccine or a treatment if there's frequent testing, quarantine of positives, contact tracing, repeat Absent that we social distancing and caution can reduce the spread, but there's no will in the Federal executive to make that happen because they're focused on reopening the economy. In a patchwork environment where some states are acting responsibly and some aren't and it's very hard to close state borders, efforts of responsible states will be undermined. Further, since states can't print their own money, a lot of Federal support is needed for them to behave responsibly, and the Senate is not altogether on board with that. Very long way of saying: Doesn't necessarily need to be a vaccine, but there needs to be *something* among the four paths of "able to test at the door and refuse admission to virus shedders", "minimize the severity of the illness with cheap, effective treatment or even cheaper, effective prophylaxis with no or tolerable side effects", "effective, available vaccine with tolerable side effects", and "extinguish virus by identifying and quarantining carriers and doing robust trace-and-test". Currently not one of those is available to us and there's no reason to believe they will be available in 2020 - but a lot of people are working on vaccine / treatment / prophylaxis / testing, so maybe there'll be something in the foreseeable future. I don't know about your community, but ours skews older (despite the valued presence of some younger people, some of them also immunocompromised) and has associated comorbidities, so I'm included to view our holding dances I wouldn't feel safe going to as irresponsible, and even a deal like "only let people in who sign a waiver saying that if they get sick they won't sue us" risks not only affecting our dancers but anyone they come in contact with, so is not an acceptable option for me. I hate it, but that's how I see it. -- Alan
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