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Our camp is in Canada, in conjunction with our medical advisory panel we have decided not to mandate vaccines, mainly because we feel even if we were to put a mandate in place it doesn’t prevent campers from attending asymptomatically and transmitting to other campers. We are asking all campers to complete a rapid test the night before leaving for camp and an online health screening questionnaire the morning of camp. We also don’t have mandatory masking. We had the opportunity to put all process into practice a few weeks ago with a weekend camp of 42 teens attending. Even though everyone tested negative before arrival within 24 hours we had a camper become symptomatic and then test positive. She was immediately isolated and removed from camp and other campers within her cabin group were tested. What our “trial run” did show us was that we hadn’t allocated enough isolation space for the summer camping weeks. If we had more than 2 people test positive at the same time it would severely restrict access to the health centre, so we’ve relocated the isolation area to a separate cabin for the summer.
We do however have a mandatory vaccine requirement in place for seasonal staff, this is more down to staffing issues than for health reasons. Where we are in Canada, unvaccinated close contacts even without symptoms and a negative test have to isolate for 10 days, which could severely restrict our operations throughout the summer.
I think this will be an ever changing situation, but for sure will be a challenge this summer!