September 2023
(revised)

When we were hit with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, BCCF worked hard on finding resources, advice, and hope for member choirs across the province. Some of those resources are archived at https://bcchoralfed.com/resources/covid-19-resources/ including the most recent, from summer 2022: Re-Starting Your Choir.

As we launch the 2023-2024 season, many of the questions remain the same – and we have to offer similar responses:  the BCCF cannot tell you what you should do with your choir – we can only point out some discussion issues, and leave it to each choir to make individual decisions.

There is no longer any provincial mandate either for masking or for vaccines. If that changes, then we, like everyone else, need to follow that mandate.  Many choirs are just continuing as normal; others have more anxiety, and may be asking members to maintain vaccine use – older singers and immune-compromised people are having to make decisions based on their comfort-level, and that may mean that they have membership rules around that.

Brian Conway, who heads up the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, says that unless another bad variant appears, we have to just learn to live with COVID – as we do with colds, flu, RSV etc.

With my own choir, we have several people who are anxious, and who prefer to mask for rehearsal and performance, and I encourage them to do what makes them feel better. We do not ask for vaccine status, but we do ask people to do their own self-check before rehearsal, and if they’re not sure, we ask them to mask and/or sit apart and/or attend rehearsal on Zoom. We continue to be aware of ventilation and spacing.

Three tiers to consider

• protecting ourselves from others – so we mask, or we sit apart, or we Zoom in on a rehearsal, or we don’t attend at all
• protecting others from ourselves – so we do our health checks before rehearsal, and don’t attend if there’s anything that might infect someone else
• the question is whether we need to protect others from others, or whether we assume that they are responsible adults, taking one or the other actions above.  We have to decide whether we police behaviour or whether we respect each other’s ability to make good decisions.

By now most of us have some degree of immunity to COVID, whether from exposure or from vaccine. But all those other viruses are still around, and will occur more frequently as the fall leads people to gather inside rather than outside.  The decisions made by a seniors’ choir may be different from those made by a youth choir, for instance, and BCCF is not able to make a one-fits-all recommendation. At the height of the pandemic, the restrictions we offered were important for all of us; now all we can do is say, talk to your people, and use common-sense!

Best wishes for this season, and please feel free to contact me if you have questions about any of the above or about protective choir protocols.

Brigid

Brigid Coult
BCCF Project Manager