Tuesday, February 9th, 2021
This entire COVID business is getting super annoying and is resulting in a jungle of rules and regulations hard to understand.
Outdoor gatherings are limited to 25 people or 1 person per 20 square meters, but there are exceptions for religious services, funerals and weddings. Indoor gatherings are more restricted and the latest I learned is that drive-in movie nights are restricted to 50 vehicles with rules about contact less sales of food and beverages and ensuring there are no lines for washrooms. Some of this I understand.
But, for the life of me I do not understand why the 50 car limit when everyone has to stay in their car and is not allowed to mingle. It makes no sense at all! And why can more cars attend a church service than a movie?
There is an option to seek a permit for larger gatherings from the National Park services if such gathering is held in a park, so maybe that is the way to go for the drive-in graduation. There is also an option to receive special approval from the county or enquire if such an approval would be granted if requested. We of course need an approval for 550 cars! So, 11 times the current limit. Somehow, I have my doubts if it wise to ask for this even. I mean once we have been told no, that’s it. I have no idea how we would be able to do a drive-in graduation on the current metrics. Apart from the fact that with 550 students they would need to call four names a minute to keep the entire thing to a two-hour time frame. Just half a minute per student would make it a four-hour event….
Even if we had permission to have 550 cars in a parking lot, we would need to rent toilettes as surely over three or four-hour period there will be people with the need to relieve themselves. Maybe this whole drive-in graduation is a bad idea.
If gathering outside every person needs to have 20 square meters of space it translates into 11.000 square meters of space required alternative prom. Or each student gets a one-hour slot, which would require some sort of booking system. It would also mean clearing each batch out before the next batch arrives. Assuming five hours this would still mean roughly 100 students per hour, four times what the county metrics currently allow.
I can see both of these events turning into a logistical nightmare. Unless of course health indicators improve dramatically. Currently the trajectory is looking good with only 71k new cases added nationwide over the past 24-hours, bringing the US total to 27.7 million and vaccine roll out picking up significantly. However, the mutants are somewhat of a wild card and could drive numbers up again.
There here is an interesting and innovative alternative to testing - COVID sniffing dogs. They can be used as an alternative to testing as they have the ability to identify infections with 96% acuracy, the same as a PCR test. Maybe we should get some of those for the BCC alternative prom!