Reopening the Dojo During Covid-19: A Proposal

Originally published on Medium.com 10 August 2020

The following is the text of a proposal that I developed to reopen the dojo where I am an aikido student, Aikikai of Philadelphia. Like everyone else, we closed down at the beginning of the pandemic. Aikido is a great practice — physical and fun, with a lot of rolls and throws, but also mentally nourishing, because it basically involves thinking about martial arts in terms of physics: how does the opponent’s momentum provide the energy for this technique? For this reason, however, aikido is typically practiced with a partner or in a group, which makes it poorly suited to the current circumstances.

Like many groups, we have been doing regular Zoom classes throughout the pandemic. But Zoom cannot fully replicate the physical and emotional health benefits of in-person training, and as a public health person who has studied epidemic disease, I believe that reopening can be done in a way that honestly recognizes and addresses the risks of Covid-19. I am posting this document, which I wrote for my own group, as an example that other organizations might look to as they think about how to communicate with members and start a reopening conversation. Note that the proposal is written in the form of a Q&A exchange.

Overview:

This is a proposal to reopen the dojo for in-person, partner-based training. The goal is to take reasonable steps to reduce the risk of an outbreak in our community and to confine the disease’s spread while still allowing us to return some of the benefits of training together at the dojo. This is not a full return of pre-pandemic normal. It is also not a perfect protection against Covid-19. Rather, it attempts to trade some greater disease risk for some normalcy in training.

Why should I trust you on this stuff?

Although I am an academic Ph.D., rather than an M.D., part of my specialty training is in public health and epidemic disease. I did a post-doc in Penn’s Health and Societies program, am currently teaching Global Public Health for La Salle, and have an ongoing appointment with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where my most recent exhibit, “Going Viral,” is about infectious disease, public health, and pandemics, both historic and recent. It opened at the Mütter Museum alongside our big exhibit on the 1918 flu pandemic last fall. (We were unexpectedly super-relevant for like three months, there, before everything closed.) I am read up on this stuff.

Also, this proposal is going to Dr. John, who as we all know is a truth-teller who will have no problem calling it out for garbage if he thinks I’m way off base.

Why go back to in-person training in the midst of the pandemic? Why not just wait it out?

The benefits of in-person training are probably obvious, but I will list a few quickly. First, there are types of training that just don’t work as well without a partner to throw or a mat to roll on. Second, the dojo is not just a gym; it is a community and a social space. Community and physical socialization are deep needs that all of us have, as humans. Video chat is great. We are all thankful for it. But it can’t fully meet those needs.

Covid-19 is more dangerous and more contagious than recent flu strains or most other diseases that we ordinarily worry about. But its not magic; the disease spreads in ways that are predictable and manageable, and the risk of illness is differentially spread across different groups of people. And although the disease is widespread, it still afflicts only a minority of the population and progresses in predictable ways. At this point the ability of doctors to treat the disease has also improved over time, as it always does in a pandemics (it’s the School of Hard Knocks). For all these reasons, I think we can reduce and contain the risk of the disease to a manageable level for many dojo members with some relatively straightforward steps.

That’s good, because I think this pandemic situation is unfortunately likely to go longer than many folks are hoping. The great hope for ending this pandemic remains that we will get a vaccine to protect us from the relevant coronavirus. But that process is fraught in all kinds of ways. There are already Phase III vaccine trials happening, including here in Philly. It is impressive and unprecedented, in terms of speed (there’s an interesting story there about new technology and also some vaccine efforts that got shelved after SARS and MERS ended up not being pandemics). But the record on vaccine development is pretty hit-and-miss. A lot of stuff can go wrong. And even if the trials work out, and even if we have an unprecedented worldwide manufacturing effort, it just takes a lot of time and resources to produce and distribute vaccine. We’re talking months — in other words, early 2021 — at the very least.

Also, it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that human bodies have shown only limited acquired immunity to existing coronavirus strains, which is one reason why you get colds your whole life (coronaviruses are responsible for 10–20% of the “common cold” cases in circulation at any given time). The new vaccines might work better — there’s some very cool stuff going on around mobilizing the body’s T-cells for long-term immunity — but the jury is still out. No one has had Covid-19 for that long. It might be that you have to get the vaccine every year, like the flu. And it is very, very likely that Covid-19 will remain endemic, like the measles.

Also, pandemics just happen periodically. We might as well have a plan lying around that we can pull out for the next swine flu, or whatever.

Okay, that was a lot of wind-up. What’s the plan?

Let’s start with the big picture. In a nutshell, the plan is for “pod” classes, meaning small, pre-determined groups of students meeting with one instructor on a rigid schedule for a 4–6 week period. Pod size would need to be determined by interest and availability of people and instructors, but my starting suggestion would be 3–5 students and 1 instructor per night, meeting from 6–8 pm, per usual. Class within a pod would actually be normal-ish, but with some specific behavioral changes (discussed below), like wearing masks during training.

How do pods protect me from Covid-19?

Putting people into pods and on a rigid schedule protects you in several ways. First, it limits the increase in the number of contacts that you have. Real talk: the best way to avoid Covid-19 is to have no contacts with anyone. This is not that. But if each “pod” only contains people from four other households (three other students plus the instructor), that is a big increase, epidemiologically speaking, but it is not absurd.

Second, the rigid schedule is important. Covid-19 spreads easily in part because people can transmit the disease before they become symptomatic. But that pre-symptomatic period is probably only a 24–48 hour window. If you only meet your pod every seven days, and someone else gets sick, there’s a pretty good chance that they either develop symptoms AND DON’T COME TO CLASS, in which case you are okay, or their infection has not yet developed enough that they are shedding a lot of virus, in which case you are also likely okay. Meeting only one night a week thus creates a relatively small window of opportunity for infection.

(Yes: Covid-19 may also spread through people who are asymptomatic, but there’s not much we can do about that. Again: this plan involves non-zero risk.)

Third, the pods mean that if we have an outbreak in the dojo, it will probably be contained to only one small group of households. There is little evidence that the novel coronavirus can remain suspended in the air for long periods (measles does this, which is why it is so stupidly infectious), and there is likewise little evidence for surface transmission, as in you get it by touching a contaminated surface. Most coronavirus transmission seems to involve people in relatively close contact with one another. So if someone comes to the dojo sick, they will probably only pass it on to the other people in that pod.

What can we do to prevent transmission within pods? (New Rules)

I can’t say this strongly enough: THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE THAT YOU COULD GET SICK IF YOU TRAIN WITH A SICK PERSON. I just want to be honest about this. That said, there are measures we can take to mitigate the risk. As Dr. John pointed out, he has worked in a hospital around sick people for months without getting infected.

I propose the following rules to mitigate the risk within pods:

1) DO NOT COME TO CLASS IF YOU FEEL SICK. DO NOT COME TO CLASS IF YOU HAVE ANY FLU-LIKE SYMPTOMS IN THE PREVIOUS 24 HOURS. The dojo has contactless temperature scanners, which instructors will use to scan students when they arrive at the dojo. Anyone with a temperature 100.4 degrees or higher will be sent home. But let’s be honest: fevers can come and go in the day. If you had a fever earlier, please do us all a favor, and call in sick.

2) Dress out before you come to class, or arrive early enough that one person can use the dressing room at a time. It is a much more enclosed space than the mat area.

3) Everyone should wear a mask the entire time, and we should have some basic mask guidelines. Masks will need to cover the mouth and nose. You may have seen those masks with the little valves in them. These are bad. The valves make it easier to breathe because they do not block your exhalations. But if you are sick, you are exhaling virus. The rest of us want your exhalations blocked.

Look: the mask thing sucks. It makes it harder to breathe. You will notice it, working out. But masks work, even though they aren’t airtight. The virus is carried in tiny droplets of moisture that you exhale. A cloth mask picks up those droplets, which is why your mask will likely be wet by the end of practice.

Also, the masks will make us all look like ninjas, which isn’t really an aikido thing, but maybe we should just embrace it? I mean, we have swords…

4) Everyone should wash their hands before class, and someone should probably run the dust mop over the mats after practice. Even though surface transmission is probably not a big deal, hand hygiene is a good thing that we should all do better. Everyone should bring their own water bottle or cup to fill, rather than drinking straight from the fountain spigot.

5) If you get diagnosed with Covid-19, you need to inform the instructor and your classmates so that they can get tested and self-quarantine.

6) We will pre-decide on a set of circumstances whereby the dojo plans to close again. These could include any of a mix of factors: transmission rate (so maybe if Rt goes above 1 in Philly, we close), county opening phase, outbreak in the dojo, Jupiter is in retrograde on the Ides of March, or whatever. The reason to have rules in advance is that if we don’t decide in advance, we might wait too long to close down when the moment comes.

POSSIBLE OPTIONAL RULES:

I don’t think these rules add a lot of additional safety. The reason is simple: working out is going to involve breathing heavily and moving around in an enclosed space. Adding a little bit of distance might marginally decrease your risk, but I don’t think it adds a lot. That said, individual pods might want to discuss using these rules if they would help people to feel more safe and comfortable in the dojo.

1) Pairing up — this is what it sounds like. You work with only one partner in your pod. A pod could pair up differently each week, or you could keep the same partners for the whole 4–6 weeks.

2) Maintain distance in practice. Permanent partners could practice at maximum distance from one another in the dojo. We have enough mat space that two pairs could definitely practice six feet apart, and three could kind of manage that much spacing, if they are careful.

3) Only weapons or non-contact training. This might give you the absolute minimum risk, especially if everyone in the group was doing a max quarantine lifestyle outside of the dojo, while still allowing some high-risk folks to get out of the house. Everyone could even stay six feet apart (non-contact) or weapons-length apart for the entire class. If we want to do some kind of Max Safety Pod, this would be the way to do it.

So let’s say I buy this pod thing. How would we assemble / assign pods?

This is actually a potentially complicated issue that we would need to work on for a few weeks. It would involve having everyone do a short survey. To avoid getting deep into people’s personal lives / private health information, most of the questions would be along the lines of “rate this 1–5, give some additional info on the lines below if you want.” Then Sensei or whoever he decides would group everyone as best we can. Here are some factors we would want to account for:

1) How many people want to do this? How many instructors are actually available, and when are they available? Who can practice when?

If we have even three instructors, that could cover 12–15 students, which I think might be enough.

2) How worried are you about Covid-19?

This is one that will help people to feel comfortable. Let me blunt: if you don’t believe in the pandemic, I don’t really want to practice with you, because I don’t trust you to be safe. Conversely, if there are people in the dojo who are literally living in 100% quarantine right now but are willing to consider allowing this to be their one contact with the outside world, I think we owe it to those folks to protect them as best we can, even if that means I need to practice with “Covid-is-a-hoax” person, whoever you are. Bottom line: the goal here would be to group together people with similar tolerance for risk such that everyone feels as comfortable as possible.

3) How much exposure risk do you already have, and how much of a risk does Covid-19 pose to you / your household’s health?

This is another version of 2. Some of us have jobs or family obligations that require higher levels of contact / exposure. Others of us are basically quarantined at home, with very little exposure risk. All of us have different risk factors — age, preexisting conditions, etc. — that impact our personal risk from the disease. As much as possible, we want to group people with similar risk levels together.

This sounds like a lot of work.

Yeah. And to make it work, you need to be honest about your tolerance for risk and willing to have an honest chat with your pod-mates about everyone’s boundaries. This is an imperfect situation. All we can do is work together. There is no “I” in “dojo.” Just keep thinking about how good it will feel to have a mat under your feet once a week, and that will help with all the inconvenience.

Also, on the positive side, we only have to go through the process once, and then we can try it out for 4–6 weeks, see how everyone feels and whether the situation changes, and maybe make some adjustments.

It still sounds like a lot of work.

The work is worth it for several reasons. First, it is reasonably likely that someone from the dojo or dojo-adjacent is going to get sick at some point. If that happens, we are all going to really appreciate these procedures in the week or so where we are all worrying and waiting to see if anyone else got it. And after that, having these procedures will allow us to evaluate how well the plan worked and get going again, rather than having to start from scratch.

Second, we are all friends, but liability is still a thing. By explaining the risks, our mitigation procedures, and the limits of those procedures to everyone, we are addressing that liability. I don’t think this is really a big problem, but it’s important to do our due diligence and to be communicating.

Third, I think talking about this stuff is good for mental health. A lot of us are currently dealing with situations beyond our control, where the pandemic is scary, and screwing stuff up, and we don’t even have a lot of power over the frustrations that our jobs / families / life circumstances are putting on us. This is one corner of our lives that we can take back together, as a dojo.

(Someone cheers in the background.)

We are building a society here. We do that by talking it out, together, and developing a plan, together, and executing it, together. That’s why this is a “proposal”; my hope is that people will talk about it after practice this week. And it’s why 2 of the 3 pod questions are phrased as “how do you feel about these risks?” Even if you don’t know a lot about Covid-19, you know about your feelings, and we want to respect that.

What if I think pods aren’t for me because of my schedule, health concerns, a lingering phobia triggered by hearing the word “pods” after seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.?

I think we should continue to hold once or twice-a-week Zoom-based classes, as we currently do. Pods will not allow us to all see each other; I definitely do not think that the big classes from Saturday are a safe option (which sucks). Zoom allows us to keep the whole dojo community in contact, however imperfectly. Interestingly, I think that having an in-person option might boost attendance to Zoom classes. I think it will be easier to put up with the irritations of distance practice when you are also getting in some mat time. For that same reason, I would like to second Farah’s suggestion that we make the dojo available for some solo or partner practice during the week. It might also be fun to see the pod classes live-streamed, preferably with live color commentary by Ed and Dr. John, wearing those gigantic headphones like the guys at football games.

This is, like, six pages of text.

Sorry about that. Insanely, there is more stuff to say, but let’s stop here, for now. But let’s discuss this! Amend it! Come up with special rules! Maybe each pod could dye their whites to have matching ninja outfits? Just putting that out there.

And thanks for taking the time to read this.