My pro and I were speculating on when the first competition will be. Pre-Covid, I'd planned to dance Crystal Ball Chicago, June 18-21. Illinois is on lock down until the 31st. Of course we can't know whether that will be extended, but I suspect not. At some point, things do have to reopen even if there is some risk. But we both wonder whether enough people would be willing to risk dancing that early? I live less than a 15 minutes drive from Lombard where that competition takes place. Would out of state people be willing to fly in? Will people feel they are unprepared? I'm not sure I'd be willing to fly to a competition. I'd probably figure I didn't care so much if my preparation wasn't great. Everyone in Bronze would be in the same boat.
But perhaps I'll feel differently by the end of May! But honestly, the organizers would have tough decisions. Or maybe the decision would be taken out of their hands because too few judges would be willing to travel in? I'm sort of resigned to the idea it won't happen. I'm not entirely sure I'd go if it does happen. So... sigh.
I would certainly go to a dance competition in June if the situation were still similar to Chicago or Boston, though I'd prefer that they require masks for spectators and officials, and maybe competitors too. But then, I'm on record as saying shutting down competitions wasn't a useful measure in the first place.
I'm not so sure I would fly to get to a competition; that would depend on how full or empty I expected the airplane to be. I'd certainly prefer an airline that had blocked off all middle seats, and preferably required or even provided masks on the flight. Otherwise I might drive.
I'm not confident that businesses and events will be open in June in Massachusetts, and our cases basically switched from exponential to linear several weeks ago. In Illinois, they went linear less than a week ago. The consensus - or at least the Federal guideline - is that new cases should actually show a clear fall before relaxing mitigations, and I'm not seeing that happen unless the state figures out another effective mitigation. Maybe we could close down mass transit, and I don't think that's likely in Massachusetts.
It's actually quite frustrating watching cases continue steadily on, week after week, without declining. I'm starting to understand better why Georgia, where new cases have been constant for over a month, just decided to reopen all at once. They may have concluded that they had gotten mitigations to the point that each outbreak was dying down on its own, but there were enough imported cases from New York or elsewhere seeding new outbreaks that they couldn't do any better than they're already doing.
By the end of May, we'll know whether Georgia's experiment was a success or a disaster, so that might help guide what Massachusetts and Illinois do. If it's not a success, the question might not be whether we might have competitions this June, but whether we have competitions by June 2021.
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