We require masks, do our best at ventilation and air filtering, and try to warn folks if there's been exposure. We dance outside sometimes, though we can't guarantee masking there.
Details:
We require masks at our events, and encourage folks to use good ones; at least surgical, with a preference for N95, KN94, and similar. We don't currently provide snacks at our events, but people do briefly unmask to have water.
If we find out someone may have been contagious at one of our events, we attempt to send out email to everyone who attended that event. As of early 2024, we are changing over to using an opt-in mailing list, but until that's online, we will supplement with posts of exposure notices to the Facebook event of the night in question.
Our venue, the Democracy Center, has installed air filters sized to each room in the facility and we run those during our events. We open as many windows as weather permits, and if it's warm enough we put fans in those windows to increase airflow. We have several additional high-capacity filter units of our own that we bring to Bluesy Tuesy when an organizer can do so (depending on which organizers are coming and who is driving).
We sometimes move events outdoors or cancel entirely if the situation looks riskier than we're comfortable with. This is a moving target as the pandemic proceeds to play out.
Because of spam filtering, it's hard to guarentee everyone gets notified, and we have no way of knowing how many notifications don't get delivered. We also don't have any way to guarentee folks tell us if they might have been contagious at Bluesy Tuesy. However, we and three other area events (Double Up, Second Sun Rising, and Antumbra) have had folks notify them, so we know at least some of the community will do so.
When we're dancing outdoors, we use public space, and thus cannot control who dances or their use of masks. In Summer of 2022 when we were checking vaccinations, we would usually give out wristbands to people whose vaccination status had been checked.
From March of 2022 until March of 2023, we required proof of vaccination, and checked vaccination cards of those entering our dance and recorded that they have been vaccinated (and if applicable, boosted) along with an email address for contact tracing. We did not record dates of vaccinations. While Second Sun Rising and Eclipse required boosters, Bluesy Tuesy did not, but the vast majority of our dancers during 2022 had received at least one. We allowed certain medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for a small number of people.
We share our vaccination database with Second Sun Rising.
Results to Date
We restarted dance events in March of 2022. From March thru December, Bluesy Tuesy and Second Sun Rising together held 36 events and checked just over 400 individuals. A combined total of 3 medical exemptions were made (one unvaxxed, two unboosted). By the start of March 2023 when Bluesy Tuesy and Second Sun Rising dropped vaccination requirements, we had held an additional 11 events and checked over 500 individuals. Due to various issues there were 57 people we did not obtain a contact tracing email address for and 16 whose vaccination status we didn't have recorded.
Outdoors: In the Summer of 2022, June thru August, we ran several outdoor events which did not have controlled access; since we were out in public, anyone could walk up and join in, and we had a host try to spot people, ask for a donation, and check them in. This resulted in an additional two unboosted dancers and three that we have names for but no vaccination data.
Exposure: We have had five reports of people who were probably positive and possibly contagious during events in 2022 (two at Double Up in April, one at Antumbra in May, two at two different Bluesy Tuesys in December). At least two attendees of September 2022's Second Sun Rising reported that the state contact tracing app alerted them to being exposed, and one subsequently had covid, so we have one known possible transmission occuring at our events.
In 2023, we had three reports of people who were positive at dances, one in February and one in November, one in December.
In 2024, we've had two reports as of Jan 18. One person may have been contagious at the Jan 2 dance, one person may have been either contagious or caught covid or neither at the Jan 16 event (they tested positive on Jan 18).
For those not familiar with the local scene, Antumbra was a joint weekend put on by Second Sun Rising and Eclipse, and Double Up was a joint evening put on by Bluesy Tuesy and JP Jitterbugs.
Overall, we feel fairly proud of our level of response and results, both from our volunteers and our community. It's been a lot of work. We've had people tell us we were not being safe enough, and we've had people tell us we're too cautious or that they would not come to a masked event, often both in the same week. We have yet to hear anyone claim that dancing in masks is more fun. By November 2023, we'd had 20 months of pandemic-era dancing and only one known possible transmission (where we know we had someone positive at the event, and someone after the event became positive), Jan 2024 has added a second possible transmission (but that's less concrete since all we know is that by two days after the person was positive).