Public health and larps

Planning to travel to Auckland for a larp? Make sure you’ve been vaccinated first:

(This cuts both ways; the Ministry of Health website says those who may have been in contact with an infected person should not travel, and neither should those with early but non-specific symptoms (fever, cough, runny nose, sore eyes). Not that you should be travelling to a larp in that condition anyway)

This raises the wider issue of public health and larps. Infection risk is a health and safety issue, and larp runners are morally (and, if they are not run on a volunteer, non-profit basis, potentially legally) responsible for managing it. We’ve all heard of (or had) post-larp plague, but stuff like measles is highly infectious and actually kills people. And we really don’t want that spreading through a larp. While most people in the NZ larping community are probably vaccinated against measles (its been free since 1969) , we shouldn’t take it for granted.

As for what to do about it, asking people about their vaccination status is highly intrusive and raises serious privacy issues, and some people genuinely don’t know anymore (there’s a solution to this, I know). But we should warn people of infection risks, and encourage them to take appropriate steps. We should also make it clear that dropping out of a larp because you feel sick is the right thing to do, and provide a complete refund if that happens (I’m fairly certain everyone already does the latter, but its always worth repeating).

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If you haven’t already seen it in the Consequence group, they have an excellent policy for this: