Forum - View topicNEWS: Otakon 2021 Will Require Masks But Will Not Require Proof of Vaccination
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jrockfreak
Posts: 125 |
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I think that still requiring mask is the right decision based on how many people they will more than likely have in one space and given that most Anime fans are sensible people I dont see any attendees having a issue with it. I also think not requiring proof of vaccinations is the right move because you have some people (myself included) that have no plans on getting vaccinated so requiring proof could be cause a good amount of people to not attend.
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Also, it will be almost impossible to verify out of state attendees vaccination status. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1390 |
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I dunno, I think discouraging people who refuse to get vaccinated sounds like a pretty good idea when it comes to public health. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2294 |
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Yeah -- I, er, would rather love if folks not willing to get vaccinated didn't attend. Their widespread attendance is exactly why I'm more strongly considering not attending.
I agree with Tars that it is largely unenforceable against very motivated bad actors, but I'd like to think it would behave something like screening people at bars for fake IDs -- motivated people can slip through, but it still keeps a lot of people (who aren't willing to go to all that extra effort & legal risk) out. And, because of that, still much better than nothing. In fact, it may be that it is sufficient to kick the (vaccinated+previouslySick)/total population of Otakon-goers above the herd immunity threshold, especially considering it looks like we may be very close to, but not well beyond it, by that point. As a result, that single policy choice could have large implications for whether the 'con becomes a major infectious event or not. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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While that is quite true, the main problem is that there is no national vaccine certificate or national verification system. How would Otakon verifiy the vaccine certificates or other types of papers from visitors from out of state and beyond. I have been out of country for some months now, but does Virginia and Maryland have a universal vaccine certificate, or do you just get a printout from your doctor or clinic. It really won't be that much effort to make your own or download an existing vaccine certificate from online. |
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3767 |
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I believe New York is the only state with a vaccine passport. All we have in Virginia is the vaccine record card you get when you get the shot(s). |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2294 |
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The 'vaccine record card' zrnzle mentioned is what I had in mind. Although, I guess many people may not have kept theirs, it not being a document required for official federal or state purposes.
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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Moreover, there isn’t any way they can verify it isn’t a forgery on the spot. There would definitely be ways to figure out if it was fake with time to investigate, but on the spot, they would have no way of knowing if it were real, unless the person faking it had made a glaring error. Not that a digital vaccine passport system would be entirely immune to that, but it seems much more difficult to hack into a government database and plant false records than to print out a piece of paper and fill it in yourself. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2294 |
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I'm not super worried about forgeries and not having a national database with some kind of hard-to-fake hashed identifier or something on them; I think the lack of that would drop the policy from, say, 90% effective to maybe, pessimistically, 40% or some such effective (unless some enterprising fellow decided to spread the viral love by mass-producing convincing forgeries and found some way to rapidly market them, I guess). In either case, I'd expect a large reduction in number of unvaccinated attendees, which is potentially of great importance if you're close to but not quite sure you've hit the herd immunity threshold. Makes the difference between exponential and essentially neutral growth in viral cases.
But, I think many people having discarded them may be a bigger problem (seems like a major fairness issue, unless they have some way to get their cards re-printed), and also it seems problematic that there's probably not even a standardized form in the first place? If there are large differences in how the cards appear state-to-state (which I'm not sure there are, so certainly someone please correct me if this isn't true), or even pharmacy-to-pharmacy, etc, then it's not even clear what staff would be checking for, exactly, other than that you have some kind of card and it says something about vaccination on it. That creates a much lower bar for fakes, to the point that I'd be doubtful anyone would worry about the procedure at all, and that 40% might drop to 5% or 1%, at which point it would genuinely be quite purposeless. |
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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^From what I can tell, the record card is standardized form from HHS and CDC. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem difficult to make a convincing forgery, going by what I saw and read when I just searched “vaccine record card”. The first things that came up were stories about how fakes were becoming an issue (one of the first was Amazon removing a listing for blank ones) and what appeared to be templates for them. In that context, without a way to verify them, requiring proof of vaccination would be little different than not. In that light, I think that makes the mandatory mask policy look better, as it would be easier to enforce and would mitigate the spread in case someone who was infected came to the event.
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