Contra Dance Contact Tracing

August 26th, 2022
contra, covid-19
Many contra dances require everyone to provide their emails for contact tracing. The idea is, if anyone later tests positive for covid everyone can be notified after. While I think this is good to offer, I don't think it should be mandatory.

People have a wide range of ways they're handling covid at this point. For some, a dance will be a large portion of their weekly covid exposure, even with everyone wearing high-filtration masks. After a notification they may want to avoid visiting vulnerable relatives, get tested, or increase masking. But other dancers are regularly eating inside restaurants, participating in large meetings, having crowded indoor singing parties, where learning that one of a hundred people they shared a room with may have been infectious isn't something they're going to change behavior over.

I do think dances should continue posting publicly about positive tests and making it easy to sign up to be notified, but I don't think they should be requiring people to provide their contact information. I'm glad BIDA's made this switch, which I've been pushing for months, and I'd encourage other dances to rethink this requirement as well.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)