After the spontaneous contra dance at Porchfest, I'm helping organize another one. I wanted to get a better sense of how much covid risk an attendee would be taking, so I ran some numbers on microcovid. If everyone is masked and vaccinated, I count ~2.2 microcovids:

• ~1.7 from your partner. While your partner is not the only person your head gets close to, you're this close to at most one person at a time, so for simplicity assume its your current partner.
• ~0.2 from your neighbors and next/previous neighbors.
• ~0.2 from your next/previous hands fours.
• ~0.08 from the hands fours one farther away.

If you have multiple lines close together, you could ~double these numbers. Other social dances are likely ~half as risky.

This is a very low level of risk: about 1% of a cautious risk budget of 200 microcovids/week (1% risk of covid/year).

I wish I'd run these numbers sooner: this is probably our last chance for an outdoor dance in Boston before spring.

An outdoor dance in October 2013

We may end up dancing indoors this winter. Over the next few months I think our communities are likely to move away from treating covid as something where we have a duty to make substantial sacrifices to limit spread. Once everyone is vaccinated who wants to be, including boosters and approving the vaccine for kids, I think people will view the tradeoffs very differently.