NFPA Journal - July/August 2020 - 28

I am a lawyer whose practice focuses
on safety, security, and risk management at live events. Since the United
States shut down in early March due
to the COVID-19 global pandemic, my
work has shifted to writing health and
safety guidance for entertainment and
sports venues, corporate activations,
festival and event planners, and all
the people who work back-of-house
to make the magic happen. Creating
guidance has gone well, and our target
audience of event professionals is
taking it to heart, which is very gratifying. As my Road Rave experience
demonstrated, I am encouraged by the
resourcefulness of skilled and creative
presenters backed into a corner by circumstance, and by patrons willing to
do their part to help ensure as safe an
event as possible.
Elsewhere, however-including just
up the road in Scottsdale-patron
compliance with basic health and
safety measures has been much more
variable, and progress, if you can call
it that, continues to be spotty at best
and catastrophically wrongheaded at
worst. As bars and restaurants and
other assembly occupancies around the
country have begun to reopen, patrons
have widely ignored public health
directives urging the use of masks and
social distancing. Some of those areas,
including Arizona, Texas, and Florida,
have seen alarming spikes in new coronavirus infections, with much of the
surge driven by people in their twenties
and thirties.
Suffice it to say our current interim
period-the time following the lifting
of stay-at-home orders but before a
vaccine or cure for COVID-19-will be
filled with challenges for live events
and for assembly venues with hopes of
reopening. My purpose here is to trace
those challenges to their source-that
is, to distinguish problems we cannot
fix (because you can't reason with a
virus) from the wounds we stubbornly
inflict upon ourselves. My caveat is
that I am writing this in mid-late June
2020-my observations constitute a
snapshot and analysis of the current
moment, and a projection into the
future based on what we know now,
which may be very different from what

we know a couple of months, or even a
couple of days, from now.
By the time you read these words,
they will either be eerily prescient or
charmingly off-base. Time will tell.

The challenges of reopening
during a pandemic
On an operational level, planning to
reopen an assembly occupancy during
a pandemic requires an enormous
amount of attention to detail, none of
which was part of a life safety analysis
prior to this. Consider just a few of the
new issues related to ingress, circulation, and egress, the three phases of
any event.

my skepticism about any system that
measures external body temperature-
for the purpose of detecting COVID-19
infection, core temperature is what
matters. The fact that 40-45 percent
of infected people will be either
asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic
carriers tells me that one should invest
sparingly in temperature-checking
technology because a lot of infected
patrons will get through even a robust
temperature-screening protocol-
COVID-19 is one sneaky devil. As for
digitized versions of the old-fashioned
sweep log, I've explained to several
sellers that keeping track is the easy
part-training staff to perform the

EARLY RETURNS ON THE WILLINGNESS OF
PATRONS TO HOLD UP THEIR END OF THE
HEALTH AND SAFETY COMPLIANCE BARGAIN
ARE NOT PROMISING. SO FAR, THE WILL
OF THE PEOPLE SEEMS TO LEAN HEAVILY
TOWARD WILLFUL IGNORANCE.
In the sepia-tone days before March,
risk management at the point of public
ingress was mostly about checking
tickets and preventing weapons and
illegal drugs or alcohol from entering
the premises. This was challenging
enough. Now, responsible professionals
will require some kind of testing or
screening to reduce the likelihood that
infected people will enter. The testing
is often less robust for patrons than
workers, and none of it is especially
effective given the high number of
people who will be either asymptomatic
or pre-symptomatic carriers.
Interestingly, I have been receiving
emails from purveyors trying to sell
me thermal scanners, as well as other
health and safety products including
walk-through disinfectant gates and
software for tracking cleaning and disinfecting schedules. The sellers of the
(expensive) scanners seem surprised at

task thoroughly is the challenge I care
about more. As well, I am a fan of the
fully integrated event management
software programs that already exist
and that I've seen put to excellent use
at large stadiums and arenas. Any of
these programs could document cleaning schedules quite nicely.
Regarding circulation, anyone can
figure out that general-admission
events will be hardest to reopen
during the pandemic because social
distancing is most difficult in undivided spaces. But every reserved-seat
venue, from stadiums and arenas
to offices, movie theaters, and airplanes, also has many areas where
people circulate freely in undivided
space before they take their seats. For
example, restrooms, formerly just a
sanitary issue, now present nightmarish logistical perils for every venue
of any size. Underscoring this point,

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NFPA Journal - July/August 2020

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