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 <[email protected]> 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.
> 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--
On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 5:59 AM Perry Shafran <[email protected]> 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<[email protected]> 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
[email protected]
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