The Met rules that audience must wear masks
NewsThe Metropolitan Opera has updated its Covid policy:
The following is a summary of the key health and safety requirements currently in place at the Met. Please be sure to also read the detailed requirements below.
1 For the 2022–23 season, audience members will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination to attend a performance or event.
2 While inside the opera house, however, everyone is required to wear a properly fitting mask over their nose and mouth, except when eating or drinking in designated areas. Gaiters, bandanas, and masks with exhalation valves are not permitted.
Most European opera houses have abandoned this requirement.
Smart decision.
Masks stop the spread of a potentially deadly respiratory disease. Most of the Met’a clientele are elderly, hopefully making them feel more comfortable returning to the Opera house.
Good decision, Mr. Gelb
@Gunther Kraus:
Masks stop the spread of a potentially deadly respiratory disease.
No, they don’t. They just make wimps feel morally superior.
Mr. Slayer, as I am sure you know, COVID kills without regard to physical strength, intelligence, or how manly you would like to think of yourself as.
Please do not refer to people who follow science and choose to not expose themselves to this disease as “whimps.”
If you care, here is a serious study irrefutably pointing out the efficacy of mask wearing in public places to stop the spread of SARS COVID 2.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118
Hi Gunther. You, and this study, are most egregiously incorrect. The spread of the deadly virus has most definitely not been stopped. Perhaps you even know of someone who has contracted the virus. I’m a doctor.
Guten Tag, Herr Doktor —
Besides the letters in front of your name, please point to serious peer reviewed research that backs up your perspective.
I think you have tried to discredit my post by making it say something.
There is no silver bullet that will stop Covid, however tools such as vaccinations, masking, paxlovid, working togethe have the ability to protect against disease and prevent from worst case scenarios.
I’ll raise you 150 studies to your “irrefutable “ one study… https://centerforneurologyandspine.com/do-masks-work-see-the-review-of-over-150-studies-below/
None of the data in that table cites serious peer reviewed studies. It’s internet garbage.
You’re a loser. Next.
Snark shark: I’ll raise you 150 studies to your “irrefutable” one study…
Whoa, Snark shark, did you fail to notice that this “one study” was actually a thoughtful literature review of multiple studies worldwide that have demonstrated the efficacy of masking in various contexts? This review from PNAS – Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – is more persuasive than your link. Your “150 studies” are no such thing – they’re a hodgepodge of articles, not all of them studies and many of them unrelated to Covid, cobbled together by former Trump science advisor Paul Alexander and posted by a clinic in Arizona. Did you notice that Alexander carefully omitted all of the studies showing mask efficacy, cited in the PNAS? Talk about confirmation bias!
And did you know that Alexander once advised his boss Trump that all but the highest risk individuals should intentionally expose themselves to Covid to produce herd immunity? Boy, did that turn out to be bad advice! You can read all about it here: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd-immunity-strategy-446408
Quality over quantity, Snark shark, and science over snark.
From another source, masks don’t work.
https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
Gus, did you notice that they carefully omitted any and all studies that have demonstrated mask efficacy? Or that the Swiss Policy Research (SPR) site is “an anonymous, pseudoscientific research group that claims to be exposing pro-NATO propaganda. The site has published false claims, including about COVID-19,” according to NewsGuard, and peddled conspiracy theories.
Hi Nimitta, I am afraid you are wrong, they did list reports of a positive efficacy of mask wearing, it was under Section G, you needed to read the whole article, but all the studies were weak or there were cofounders.
I am also surprised that you think studies from CDC, WHO, Cochrane review, Harvard Medical School, BMJ etc. are part of conspiracy theories.
Remember, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news. They all keep coming true.
Keep an open mind.
@Gunther: As I’m sure you realise, some people do die of diseases of which they were statistically not obvious candidates. These people are invariably a tiny minority. If you still believe that masks stop the spread of what is now no more than a common cold for the overwhelming majority of the earth’s population and that covid poses a substantial threat to those outside of its core client base: the old, fat and ill, then I can’t help you.
Glad to know you will not be attending the Met this season, should I choose to visit. I’ll feel a lot safer.
Very smart. But you can remove the mask when you want to eat or drink.
The virus is very polite and doesn’t bother those who are eating or drinking. It only goes after those who are enjoying an opera. The science has proven this.
Big mistake… and they wonder why people won’t come back.
People who don’t want to wear masks for hours won’t come. And those who are nervous will not be reassured.
Lose-lose!
He as they all in the club of money from the thin air!
Yes! Masking is how we will get back to full(er) classical music audiences. It’s not ideal, but as explored recently on SD (from NY Times), audiences are currently 30-40% below pre pandemic. I am quite sure that owes primarily to Covid caution among older patrons. Wearing high quality masks is the only proven means of minimizing spread, and the sooner we can accept/normalize it, the sooner we will demonstrate attending indoor performances is as safe as any other activity. Until then, we will struggle with attendance – not a sustainable path in my view.
Most masks are just ornaments.
It is baffling to see, for instance, doctors insisting on a vaccination, when they wearing a surgical mask.
If you are interested in protection, that would be the FFP3-mask.
“When Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fall – up to 100% – in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff.”
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-working-on-covid-19-wards-cut-hospital-acquired-infections-dramatically
FFP3 respirators providing 31-100% protection (and most likely 100%) against infection from patients with COVID-19.
https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/news/uk-ffp3-masks-study-shows-they-significantly-reduce-the-risk-of-covid-19-infection-290621
Happy dapper concert!
These people will never be tired of two subjects: 1) Being afraid and 2) power.
Mask-wearing should be a personal choice. If the Met forces me to wear a mask, no problem. I have a special mask which got into a tangle with a very sharp knife. I barely notice any reduction in air flow when I’m wearing it.
Let me offer you a little piece of medical observation as an ER doctor: if your lungs can’t handle a mask, your lungs can’t handle Covid. You’re playing a silly dangerous game with yourself.
Then how did my lungs just handle Covid with flying colors a few months ago? Same with my entire family. None of us vaccinated, and it was still no worse than a bad flu.
Does it not occur to you that the vast majority of people who get Covid do just fine? Especially with Omicron, an exceptionally mild strain. You’re working in a place where you only see the severest cases… Your perception is skewed; what you see, is not the reality for most people.
Your evidence is purely anecdotal. The plural of anecdote is not data. The United States is logging between 400 and 500 deaths from Covid per day, why don’t you ask the families of the millions of Americans who have been lost to this horrible virus if they give a flying fuck about your family’s data point.
The empirical scientific evidence is that masks make no fucking difference!! Now get back in your hazmat suit and piss off.
You lost me at fucking, the last resort for the ignorant.
Cite your sources. “Families” and “flying f*cks” do not peer-reviewed studies make.
Probably ‘with’ rather than ‘of’, but we’ve had this debate ad nauseum in Europe. How many of the deceased were obese? A large percentage, I’d wager. They are covid’s target client base.
It’s never been all about you.
Long term Covid has not affected your lungs, but it has affected your brain.
You are not thinking clearly and do not even realize it because of brain fog.
Annecdotal logical fallacy.
It would make more sense, top sell fewer seats, in order to have more distance to wach Others. For long operas like Strauss’, Wagner or Verdi etc. it is definitely not a good idea to wear a mask for 3 or even 5 hours. But financial profit is of course most important…. And good to know, that the audience ist allowed to eat without wearing masks… Anyone there during the intervals to pay attention to people standing nearby top each other while eating and drinking?? 😉
Yes, because we all know what a profitable venture opera is.
If Met costumer will make a MET their own for sales, I would understand the profits, but for now profits come from wholesale BS.
I won’t attend anything without a mask. Unfortunately, there are plenty who, either unwittingly or willfully, won’t wear them properly, and the policy more often than not doesn’t seem all that strictly enforced (eg. you have to wear a mask, but they’re not going to say anything if you wear it down around your ankles, unless somebody else makes a stink about it). Not real happy about the acceptability in this instance of bandanas and gaiters. Bandanas are great for pirates, maybe, and I thought gaiters were to protect boots. Anyway, that’s my two cents, so go ahead and down-vote me.
I misread the bit about bandanas and gaiters, but by then it was too late. (There is no edit function.) I know how unusual it is for Slipped Disc followers to misread and to go off halfcocked, so by all means down-vote this too!
Hi Ross, I downvoted you as per your request. Please continue not attending anything, this will be safer for you and no one else need be exposed to your soyness. I’m a doctor.
‘Dr. Birchley Poundbottom’: I’m a doctor.
No, you’re not. You’re a troll whose screenname alludes to wood and anal sex.
In addition to being spurious, your comments here are cruel. They stray far from our imperative in medicine, primum non nocere – first, do no harm.
@Nimitta: If you feel you’re in danger of being made anxious you’d better create a safe space and turn off your computer.
Sensible decision. NYC is still averaging several thousand new Covid cases a day.
Anyone who has seen how packed the lobby gets before curtain time knows it would become a super-spreader event if masks weren’t required there.
and yet you can ride on a plane and walk through an airport without one, and nobody is calling the airport a “super spreader”…
Cases? Ooh-gah. Send in the cavalry.
Worse yet…the singers are required to wear masks in rehearsals as well as be tested THREE times each week (which goes against CDC guidelines). How can a singer grow and develop vocally in a rehearsal period while wearing a mask? Preparation on a role, before rehearsals begin, is, of course, important. But the rehearsal period, working with other signers, director, conductor, etc., requires being able to develop further. The mask wearing constantly in rehearsals goes against the technical training that singers have developed over the years and works against their preparation to perform once the masks come off late in the rehearsal period and for performances. Testing three times a week, when no symptoms are present, is beyond the suggestion of health officials as well. This is too much control.
There is no sense in the ruling because it is illogical. I worked at a major international festival this summer where the singers were not required to wear masks but we, who were a long way away and who didn’t speak, had to.
A case was detected (wow! stop the press!) so we all had to go and get tested. We all tested negative but had to put our masks back on in rehearsal while the singers, also negative but mask-free, sprayed their saliva all over the place. No-one became a ‘case’, no-one fell ill. It’s a pile of pointless shite and everyone knows it.
What a complete waste of time. In New York city one does not need a mask in supermarkets, churches, gyms, the subway, the trains, airplanes, or really anywhere else at all. Restaurants are packed, no masks. Madison Square Garden, the Beacon, and Radio City are all holding sold out concerts, no masks. It is only hoity-toity not-for-profit‘s and Broadway that are continuing this ridiculous virtue signaling. Of course their audience is off 30 to 40%. They deserve to lose their audience, and their money.
The NY MTA still requires masks on vehicles and in indoor stations, though enforcement is pretty much non-existent.
Broadway and the Met are quite different. If the pandemic has revealed anything, it’s the depth of talent available to jump into Broadway performances at the last minute. This isn’t the case with opera, even in non-pandemic times.
How about engaging with the actual argument, which is that every other sector of society has moved on with regard to masking and testing, and they have done so successfully. The MTA not only doesn’t enforce masking, it’s not even keeping track of it. It’s a lame duck law that exists solely on the books, like a jaywalking.
If the Met and Broadway want to insist on masking and endless Covid testing, then they don’t get to complain about casting issues while they continue to insist on keeping perfectly healthy people at home because they showed up as “positive“ on a Covid test.
My experience with Covid tests is that you simply keep taking the test until you get the result you want.
If someone is sick, actually sick, then they should stay home and rest up. Otherwise, keeping healthy people out of work because of big bad scary Covid is just stupid. All the Covid hypochondriacs should stay home and let the rest of us live our lives. It’s been almost 3 years, we have effective vaccines, so move on already.
Most Broadway stars insist on masks. Patty LuPon had a fit when she noticed one woman sitting in front without one. Some Texas tourist of course.
Jim, I’m afraid you’re completely incorrect about Broadway masking. Broadway stopped asking audience members to mask on July 1st.
Also, Patti LuPone is a crazy narcissist who has a public fit about anything she can find to yell about; whether it’s masks or cell phones or loud lozenge wrappers. It may be fun to make fun of audience members from outside of New York City, but the fact is there’s no situation in which is acceptable for performers to be yelling at the paying audience. If you like that sort of behavior, you ought to encourage it at the Met. There’s nobody there anyway.
No proof of vaccination required? That’s a rather serious and dystopian misstep by the Gelb-in-Chief.
My baloney has a first name, it’s c-u-c-k-e-d, my baloney has a second name it’s: either Gelb, Klaus, Rowe etc.
Spot on.
Imagine sitting through all of Gotterdammerung with a mask on. Sounds pretty fun.
Managed through Meistersinger, not to mention a number of intercontinental flights.
Of course, I had to change the mask.
For your ears as well, no?
Plenty did it the other day at Bayreuth. They only took the mask off at the end to boo more effectively.
Nursing staff in hospitals wear masks for 10 hour shifts. Not a problem.
How often has the mask myth been debunked? Clearly not often enough for the protection-dependent. Pathetic.
Cloth masks are indeed a joke and posturing.
Regular surgical masks may have helped in the initial phase of the pandemic, definitely not Omicron.
N 95 / FFP3 masks definitely help.
Disinformation. Talk to doctors and other hospital staff who wear masks all day, some of whom are around Covid patients. My brother is one of them. Guess what: He has not yet contracted the virus.
Crazy.
Good. They should get chorus members to do the same.
You’re singling out the MET here, and letting the SD trolls have at them, but I’m pretty sure every major American orchestra is requiring the same. Last year both Baltimore and the NSO required proof of vaccination and masks. Dropping the proof of vaccination actually means there’s a relaxation of previous requirements.
Can someone explain to me why my surgeon and all the nurses and anesthesiologist wore a mask during my 4 hour Lung surgery? were they all cosplaying? Or did they not want a greater chance of thier respiratory droplets flying around the room into my wound?
So— do masks do anything? Id like to let the staff know they would be more comfortable next time.
Right John, because opening a persons chest up and breathing into it is exactly the same thing as sitting to next to someone at the opera. You must be a Democrat.
Yes, it is. Because one’s lungs can absorb droplets as well as an opened chest.
And this person probably is a Democrat, because he doesn’t appear to embrace COVID denial as some kind of political nihilism.
Just wear a mask. It will at the very least keep you from getting a cold.
Surgeons wear masks to shield themselves from spurts of blood and other bodily fluids (or particles)–not to safeguard the patient. The latter would entail their wearing respirators (in lieu of face masks) which practically none do.
No, they didn’t want the droplets in your open wound, nor did they want sprays or splashes from your open wounds landing on their faces.
However, the masks they wore did nothing to stop any aerosolized viral particles they exhaled from permeating the room, nor will any mask anyone wears at the Met do the same unless it’s a high-quality, properly fitted N95.
As an aside:
The use of face masks in a surgical setting was frequently studied and their efficacy consistently inconclusive prior to Covid:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/infectioncontrol/16278
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/
https://www.journal.acorn.org.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1105&context=jpn
Wow, your stupidity is limitless.
In the case described by John here, those masks definitely “do” something very important: they protect medical staff from lawsuits much more effectively than they protect anyone from COVID infection.
Fine. I won’t be supporting them in any way.
So you can fly to New York City, without wearing a mask…ride the subway without a mask (nobody bothers to enforce it)…go out to eat, without a mask…go shopping, without a mask……and put one on inside the Met. Makes sense.
Most Broadway theaters are still requiring masks, as are the star performers. I have no problem with them. A side benefit too is that that they cut down on colds.
Actually, Broadway dropped its mask mandate for audience members on July 1st.