Being Mask Police
Sep. 9th, 2022 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretWorking as a Runner at Worldcon was my first experience being Mask Police. I had mixed feelings about it; I have already written here about my ambivalence about masking as a COVID mitigation strategy: I'm not convinced by the evidence that it has much impact, compared to vaccination, testing, therapeutics, distancing and other mitigation strategies, but I'm not unconvinced enough to stop wearing it in indoor spaces, so I am still consistently masking in indoor spaces. In any case, even if I were an enthusiastic mask supporter, it's never fun to go around telling people to do things they don't want to do.
Chicon had, by report, 3,574 warm bodies attending. It required proof of vaccination at registration and required masking at all times in all con spaces with the exception of one area of the con suite that was for unmasked eating, and with the exception of brief mask removals for drinking liquids in hallways. And I would say that in my observation, 95% of the time, people held by those rules. But there were also hotel staff, hotel visitors, residents of the attached apartment building... and none of them were required to wear masks. And everyone was free to unmask when they were off con premises. So the policy was inherently limited in effect.
The remaining 5% of the time, among con members, was my problem. I'm not a very confrontational person in real life, I save my troll energy for the internet. I tried to be polite but present it as a fait accompli that they were in the wrong. My standard phrase was "Excuse me, could I please ask you to put your mask back on?" 'Back on', implying, of course, that they had previously had it on, which wasn't always the case. But by saying 'back on', I was treating them as if we were in a world where of course they knew that they needed to be wearing a mask, I wasn't going to be taking any argument on that point.
Most of this was people who had just come from outside or their hotel room and had simply forgotten to put their mask on. These people were easy to deal with, I asked them to put their mask back on, they said of course, and they put it back on. On the first day I also dealt with a few people who somehow hadn't realized that Chicon had a mask requirement, or at least disingenuously claimed that they hadn't realized. I guided a few of them to the Ops office where we gave them a mask and told them they would need to provide masks for the rest of the con and all seemed well from that point on; One person yelled at me and then ran away before I could take his badge number down, but it's possible he really was just confused, I guess.
My biggest problem was with people who circumvented the intent of the drinking rule by carrying a drink with them and periodically taking a sip as they walked. That itself was a violation of the policy, but it was difficult to confront these people, because they were generally moving and I had to make a calculation about whether by the time I reached them they would have put their mask back on and wasted my time. In theory I could have reported them to Ops for the violation anyway, but we were trying to operate in a mode of asking for cooperation rather than being punitive, especially with first time violators. And tie this in to my general skepticism of masks: If someone was blatantly in violation of the policy I would stop them, but in gray areas I would wonder how much of a difference it made, and I'd be willing to let things slide a bit if it seemed likely they'd be putting their mask back on pretty soon and save me a confrontation.
I also walked past a Table Talk where the author, a venerable and much beloved figure in our community, was unmasked and all the attendees were masked. I paused for a moment but ultimately let it slide. I figured everyone there knew what they were doing, if they wanted to kill one of the most famous writers in SFF and he was willing to die, let it be; I didn't want to be the one to yell at him. Maybe that's a failure on my part.
So far, Chicon has reported 41 COVID positives, with the number likely to increase over the next few days but probably not massively. That is slightly over 1% of the attending population. That's... not so great! Then again, everyone at the convention was fully vaccinated so the risk of serious harm from a 1% positive rate ought to be down fairly low. I think if I had known going in that I had a roughly 2% chance of getting COVID from the con, I still would have gone. All of these risk assessments are so hard to make. It's hard to know if 2% is a good number or a bad number- most of the cons that aren't as diligent about requiring masks are also not as diligent about receiving and retransmitting positive rest reports- there are stories coming out of Dragon*Con that they dropped the mask mandate halfway through the con because they didn't have the manpower or equipment to enforce it (which is horrifying from a operations point of view even aside from the public health side of it), but I haven't seen any stats on COVID rates at Dragon*Con and am not sure there will be any made public. Discon had a final positivity rate of 1.13%. Balticon had something like a half percent.
*shrug* I dunno.
EDIT: Final report has it at 60 cases.
Chicon had, by report, 3,574 warm bodies attending. It required proof of vaccination at registration and required masking at all times in all con spaces with the exception of one area of the con suite that was for unmasked eating, and with the exception of brief mask removals for drinking liquids in hallways. And I would say that in my observation, 95% of the time, people held by those rules. But there were also hotel staff, hotel visitors, residents of the attached apartment building... and none of them were required to wear masks. And everyone was free to unmask when they were off con premises. So the policy was inherently limited in effect.
The remaining 5% of the time, among con members, was my problem. I'm not a very confrontational person in real life, I save my troll energy for the internet. I tried to be polite but present it as a fait accompli that they were in the wrong. My standard phrase was "Excuse me, could I please ask you to put your mask back on?" 'Back on', implying, of course, that they had previously had it on, which wasn't always the case. But by saying 'back on', I was treating them as if we were in a world where of course they knew that they needed to be wearing a mask, I wasn't going to be taking any argument on that point.
Most of this was people who had just come from outside or their hotel room and had simply forgotten to put their mask on. These people were easy to deal with, I asked them to put their mask back on, they said of course, and they put it back on. On the first day I also dealt with a few people who somehow hadn't realized that Chicon had a mask requirement, or at least disingenuously claimed that they hadn't realized. I guided a few of them to the Ops office where we gave them a mask and told them they would need to provide masks for the rest of the con and all seemed well from that point on; One person yelled at me and then ran away before I could take his badge number down, but it's possible he really was just confused, I guess.
My biggest problem was with people who circumvented the intent of the drinking rule by carrying a drink with them and periodically taking a sip as they walked. That itself was a violation of the policy, but it was difficult to confront these people, because they were generally moving and I had to make a calculation about whether by the time I reached them they would have put their mask back on and wasted my time. In theory I could have reported them to Ops for the violation anyway, but we were trying to operate in a mode of asking for cooperation rather than being punitive, especially with first time violators. And tie this in to my general skepticism of masks: If someone was blatantly in violation of the policy I would stop them, but in gray areas I would wonder how much of a difference it made, and I'd be willing to let things slide a bit if it seemed likely they'd be putting their mask back on pretty soon and save me a confrontation.
I also walked past a Table Talk where the author, a venerable and much beloved figure in our community, was unmasked and all the attendees were masked. I paused for a moment but ultimately let it slide. I figured everyone there knew what they were doing, if they wanted to kill one of the most famous writers in SFF and he was willing to die, let it be; I didn't want to be the one to yell at him. Maybe that's a failure on my part.
So far, Chicon has reported 41 COVID positives, with the number likely to increase over the next few days but probably not massively. That is slightly over 1% of the attending population. That's... not so great! Then again, everyone at the convention was fully vaccinated so the risk of serious harm from a 1% positive rate ought to be down fairly low. I think if I had known going in that I had a roughly 2% chance of getting COVID from the con, I still would have gone. All of these risk assessments are so hard to make. It's hard to know if 2% is a good number or a bad number- most of the cons that aren't as diligent about requiring masks are also not as diligent about receiving and retransmitting positive rest reports- there are stories coming out of Dragon*Con that they dropped the mask mandate halfway through the con because they didn't have the manpower or equipment to enforce it (which is horrifying from a operations point of view even aside from the public health side of it), but I haven't seen any stats on COVID rates at Dragon*Con and am not sure there will be any made public. Discon had a final positivity rate of 1.13%. Balticon had something like a half percent.
*shrug* I dunno.
EDIT: Final report has it at 60 cases.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-09 10:28 pm (UTC)I haven't been able to convince myself that an in-person is a good idea for me yet, even with masking. At least I saved myself some travel and hotel money!
(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-12 02:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-12 02:43 am (UTC)First, you're absolutely right that in the current state of affairs, it's extremely useful to convention-goers for conventions to be transparent early about what their policies will be. But I think that news about the state of the pandemic and our tools for combating it have been moving so fast that it's really hard to do that. Chicon announced its policy about vaccinations and masking months ago and committed to not changing it, and Discon was pretty parallel in that regard, and I think that was a good thing, but it also was a limiting thing especially as state and federal rules evolved around them and the conventions found themselves out of step with how people in the local environment outside the convention were behaving. I think it's a bad operational plan but I am nonetheless sympathetic to cons throwing up their hands and saying that whatever the local government rules are is what the con will enforce. If things were working right, we should be expecting leadership on public health from the state department of health, not from the LocalConX concomm.
Second, the reason I made this post is because there's a very big difference between having rules and enforcing rules, and I understood that intellectually before last week but actually being the person enforcing the con's rules made me keenly aware of how important it is both that the convention staff is enforcing its rules, and also that separately of that, the attendees are taking the rules seriously. Enforcing the masking policy was basically fine for me when the overwhelming majority of attendees were following the rule with no prompting, but if a huge fraction of the attendees were ignoring the policy, I'm not sure how much we could've done to get things under control. And it's hard to predict which way it'll be; I mean, obviously it's a better bet that the Worldcon crowd will take masking seriously than the Dragon*Con crowd, but in between those extremes... who can say?
But third, at this point I don't entirely know what 'risk-averse' means. I mean that in the sense that I see so many different people drawing so many different red lines. Skimming the worldcon tag on twitter before the con, some people were talking about how they were shipping materials to Chicago to build C-R boxes for their hotel rooms, or buying expensive P100 masks and filters because N95s wouldn't be good enough. For some people, the 1.67% case number is extremely good, proof that Worldcon's mitigation strategies worked. For others, it's horrifically high and proof that Worldcon was a superspreader event that never should've happened. No matter how risk-averse a person feels they are, I can introduce them to some mitigation strategy that they think is massively over-cautious. I just... I feel like I'm a pretty scientifically literate person, evaluating safety risks is part of my day job, and I have very little handle on what risk averse means in the context of COVID. I find that frustrating.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-09-12 02:55 am (UTC)This is obviously a generalization but I feel like there's some level of self-selection bias, both in terms of convention culture and location. Like, if it's made clear that the con requires masks and someone decides to show up without a mask...what are they expecting? (Maybe I'm just used to being around lots of rule-followers, regardless of what those rules are.) Also size matters, I think at a smaller event it'd be a lot easier for the organizers to deal with rule-breakers personally rather than relying on people in your position.
I definitely think some of the extreme attempts to prevent transmission are not useful from a public (or private) health standpoint and have more to do with "making sure I'm a good person and did everything right." Which, we didn't start the fire here--if idiots are going to deliberately ignore vaccines or mask requirements to score political points, obviously those actions are going to become politicized even if they shouldn't be. But that provides some of the justification to leave the rules in place when their marginal utility may have dwindled.