🎥 Covid protocols in the entertainment industry 🎤
How the entertainment industry protects themselves with stringent rules and strict use of masks & tests while fooling the world with a make believe that those things aren't needed.
I’ve been hearing about the film & entertainment industry’s pandemic mitigation protocols for 2 years with envy. At first I was concerned and worried about people in the film business going back to work, having to work in close quarters with people and pretend it’s fine, and I was wondering how they were trusting each other to not be contagious and spreading the virus.
But it became clear once I heard that they were signing contracts to sequester for the duration of the job, sometimes weeks. And I’ve since seen and heard many accounts attesting to movie sets with aggressive testing, where people working are required to mask continuously full time. And that all the actors are wearing masks right up until the camera rolls, and then go right back on after the cut and between takes.
But for some reason hospitals refuse to do this with healthcare workers so they don’t infect themselves and each other, and also their cancer patients and senior citizens. We’re doing almost nothing of the sort in classrooms in most schools to protect teachers and our supposedly precious children.
But yet the people in the fiction business jump through hoops to avoid covid outbreaks while producing fantasy visions of a world where none of those measures are needed, and so we carry that denial into the real world, leading to hundreds of deaths per day in a dystopian reality, where more people, even some youths, are becoming debilitated, and people working in the food and beverage industry are left to cope with getting covid multiple times with little to no paid sick leave, and various industries dealing with short staffing due to illness.
You wouldn’t make up something so on the nose gross even if you write the most twisted science fiction. There’s no lantern to hang on it that could paper over the inexplicable and grotesque lack of any sense at all to protect society’s pretenders and jesters — but not the providers, the builders, the makers, the thinkers, and the future workers.
If you haven’t heard about this before, I strongly recommend checking out @LazarusLong13’s twitter thread of testimonials about the entertainment industry and their pandemic protection protocols — a smorgasbord of mitigations that could be the envy of every covid cautious & high risk person in the West, as well as some hospital workers and all the grandmas & grandpas.
I currently work in live theatre, but I've used film industry documents to help inform my venue recommendations for pandemic risk mitigation.
If you'd be interested in looking at some of the texts for yourself, here's a resource page from up here in Washington!
https://www.washingtonfilmworks.org/covid-resources-set-safety