Spring 2023 COVID Safety Policy Changes

In preparing for the Spring 2023 ECJ we noticed that the US COVID situation has reached a sort of equilibrium, one that could persist for a while: Infection incidence and severe consequences like hospitalization have not been changing drastically even with emergence of new variants. In light of this we thought it was time to reassess our existing COVID safety policy, looking at it as a possibly more long-term arrangement. In particular, we came to question whether we as a group needed to maintain a vaccination requirement for participating. To help decide this we asked our stakeholders – those who have attended recent ECJ jams or who have subscribed to our ECJ announcements mailing list – using (a copy) of this survey.

We received 37 responses out of around approximately 300 received invitations. The results are that most of those who felt moved to respond do not feel a need for participants to be vaccinated (or, as some pointed out, alternately to be immunized by a recent resolved infection).

Among the responses several suggested that, while they were willing to attend without the vaccination requirement, they would feel unsafe without some at-jam testing requirements.

Altogether this led us to drop the vaccination requirement but add a requirement that those attending do three self-tests, one in the 24 hour period before arriving at the jam (and have a negative result on that test before entering the jam), and then two more on the two subsequent mornings after the day that they arrived at the jam.

We are hoping that this arrangement might keep our gathering as relatively COVID-safe as we can arrange while enabling those who have not been vaccinated or had a recent infection to attend, and maybe also make the prospect of attending the jam more acceptable to those who had reservations about dropping the vaccination requirement.

As ever, we very much appreciate getting input from our community and find it illuminating.

Here is our current COVID-19 Safety policy.