Aerial Fabric Safety in the Time of COVID-19
The entire world was changed by COVID and it is still changing. The world of aerial and pole fitness has been no exception. Those students who have been willing and able to return to Brass Butterflies have seen lots of those changes: boxes outlined on the floor, wearing masks while we exercise, lots of sanitizer!
One of the concerns early in the pandemic was how we could safely relaunch our programs. Poles are easy to sanitize: grab some alcohol and wipe them down! Hoops, trapezes, ropes, hammocks, and silks seemed to be much more challenging. We were able to find ways to make our hoops safe to use by removing the tape and replacing our ropes with span sets that can be easily wiped down with sanitizer. The biggest challenge was and still is aerial fabric: the silks and hammocks.
Aerial fabric is not just your average clothing fabric (although it is actually a specific type of fabric often used for lingerie - there’s some fun history there!). It has special qualities that makes it safer for aerial use. In other words the strength and structure of the fabric is very important because it has to supporting live, dynamic loads, aka human beings, without failing and causing injury, or worse. Those special qualities also make it difficult to sanitize: it is sensitive to UV, heat, alcohol, bleach, and most other sanitizing agents. What this means is that most circus schools have been choosing between one of the following strategies:
Students must own their own apparatus and bring it to class every week
Silks must be washed between every user
Buying as many fabrics as the school can afford and assigning one fabric per student
Resting fabrics between users for a period of time, selected based on decisions informed by the most up to date scientific studies concerning how COVID-19 is spread and how long SARS-CoV-2 can live on surfaces, specifically soft porous surfaces like fabric.
In the July/August session we went with strategy #3. We purchased as many fabrics as we could afford to invest in and assigned one fabric to every student who registered for classes. This was great for limiting the number of people touching a single set of silks between washes to one, ensuring zero possibility of surface transmission. Unfortunately it severely limited the number of students we were able to serve and if we continued this way, it would eventually force us to either have to raise class prices even further or to temporarily close down the silks program again.
We are working hard to find a solution that will best serve students, our needs as a business to continue to stay viable, and our ethical responsibility to our community to provide a safe place to learn and practice.
Strategy #2 is not sustainable for our studio and the number of students we’d like to be able to serve. A single set of silks takes 4-6 hours to wash and dry. They have to be washed one set at a time as a single set of silks is approximately 50 feet of fabric (fun fact) and they get horribly tangled if you wash more than one set at a time! The studio only has one washer and dryer. There simply are not enough hours in the work week for us to wash and dry the ~ 30 sets of fabrics (silks and hammocks) we have in service right now after each user. Additionally, every wash of a fabric apparatus degrades its strength and decreases its lifespan. We do plan to still wash fabrics on a regular rotation as we always have - in between sessions and as needed if a student reports symptoms of illness mid session (another reason why we ask you to inform us if you are feeling under the weather!).
Our plan for the Fall will be to switch to a combination of strategies #1 and #4, primarily utilizing resting of fabrics. We will be resting fabrics for a minimum of 72 hours between users. Resting has been adopted by circus schools across the world, although studios are choosing their own standards for the amount of time between users, between 24 hours up to a week. The idea with “resting” a fabric is to give the fabric enough time for the SARS-CoV2 virus to die off before the next user interacts with the fabric. The reason there is no agreed upon standard is that it is still unknown how long SARS-CoV2 lives on aerial fabric as no studies specific to this use case have been done. There is still so much uncertainty around this virus and much more to learn - and that is primarily the reason around our continued dedication to our decision to implement mandatory mask use during exercise in the studio. Studies continue to show that containment of droplets is the best thing that we can be doing to contain the spread of the virus, in addition to symptom monitoring and social distancing. Recently emerging studies are suggesting that interaction with contaminated surfaces is not a major contributor to transmission of the SARS-CoV2 virus, which is hopeful news.
What this means for students is that Monday and Thursday night students will share fabrics (a single set of fabrics will be used by one student on Monday and a different student on Thursday - always the same two students with the same set of silks or hammock), as will Wednesday and Saturday/Sunday students. Tuesday night students will share fabrics with private lesson bookings (Fri-Sat) and Saturday open gyms. We will have a few sets of silks that will be available for use in open gyms or for private lesson bookings that will be rested between users.
We are looking into giving students the option to opt out of using shared equipment if they are uncomfortable by instead purchasing their own aerial apparatus and bringing that to/from classes every week for their own use. There are safety and insurance implications to this strategy that we are still investigating, but once we have the answers, if we are able to launch this program, more information will be shared at that time. We understand this option involves a significant financial investment, and that is why have not required students to purchase their own equipment and continued to provide equipment, the cost of which is built into the price of your lessons.
We believe that we are following the best precautions we can take at this time with regards to resting fabrics between users to provide a safe environment that is in line with or better than the current standard being set by circus and aerial studios around the world. If you have questions or concerns you can reach out to our Aerial Program Manager, Maya D’Alessio via info@brassbutterflies.com.
Photos: Alexa Baker