Dear, I want to provide some suggestions to provide increased safety barriers to organise FOSDEM in the current pandemic context. Currently, in the Brussels region, the government asks for this kind of events a 'covid safe ticket'; implying vaccination, recent PCR test or covid infection less than 6 months ago. It is likely this regulation will still be in place by FOSDEM-time. As we all know, vaccination is no guarantee against getting, spreading of covid, nor a full protection against hospitalisation or death. Vaccination helps of course significantly, and it is also possible that by Februari, covid is eliminated. But that is not very likely, especially not in all regions where guests are coming from. Additional safety barriers to prevent mass spreading events could be: - saliva (spit) tests are 50-70% able to catch vaccinated infected persons that day, especially if they are in the period during which they exhale the most virus. These tests cost only 2,7 euro and are non-intrusive; only a bit of spit is required, and 15 minutes later the result is known. It does - however - require a lot of volunteers to aid in taking and processing these tests. Performing 75 tests per hour per volunteer is possible. Sponsors (such as our company) could contribute to pay for these tests, and help in organising it (but it would require a lot of helping hands each morning of the event). - require (or stimulate wearing of) masks indoors. FFP2/N95 masks or better protect the wearer against infection, less protective masks can also decrease the amount of inhaled or exhaled virus particles. Less viral load leads to less severe disease and less people infected. - provide HEPA filter systems to clean the air in all indoor areas. These systems cost about 500 euro per piece, but larger rooms would require multiple units. Maybe the university already has or plans to install units like these? - provide CO2 meters to monitor the indoor air quality. A good one costs at least 100 euro. - limit the amount of people per room - this requires more volunteers to perform crowd control (which is probably a good idea anyway) - keep doors and windows open I understand some of these suggestions are hard to implement at the scale of Fosdem, yet I hope at least some suggestions will make it, if FOSDEM is organised. Grtz, Jasper -- On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 1:52 PM Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 at 23:38, Dominik George <dominik.george@teckids.org> wrote:
Hi,
thanks for informing us!
[...]
JM2C – if there is an option to make a vaccinated-only event (as opposed to no in-person event at all), please do. Please don't surrender to people who don't want to get vaccinated, like 37c3 recently did, as rumour has it.
100% this. More so if I could.
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