Yeah, but you’re meeting every drive team up close and personal. So if they got it, you got it.
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Judges are in a bunch of pits, but usually not for more than 15 minutes. There are re-interviews that could push time totals up past the threshold. The Judges will typically spend more than 15 minutes with each other. The space at the venue will determine if they can socially distance enough to reduce keep contact low. One way to limit contact could be to do something more like what they to with FTC and schedule times for teams to come and talk to the Judges in a separate space. Again, depending on space at the venue, it is possible that Judges are more than 6 feet away from anyone.
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Robot Inspector - In my experience as a robot inspector, an inspection typically takes slightly over 15 minutes. Limiting the number of people in the pits could certainly help here. YPP would require certain minimums though.
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Judge Advisor (JA) - Typically talks to the Judges and will talk to many of the other Key Volunteers. I have not done this role at an in-person event, but I think those KV interactions are usually shorter than 15 minutes.
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Field Resetter - Hard to say. They will usually have a minute of interaction with nearly everyone on the drive team per match. Like queueing, the short interactions will probably add up to contact with every member of the drive team over the course of an event. It is possible to limit this, but it would increase the game cycle time.
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Right, I don’t disagree, but that’s not within the context of the question. I think the definition of close contact is a bit lax, particularly with the more contagious variants, but if we’re using that definition very few people hit it.
What changes could be made to the way Queuing is done that could mitigate this?
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You know the pagers they have at restaurants?
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The real question. It needs a logistically sound answer for all volunteer roles.
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VEX implemented something like this (VEXText) into their “FMS” in the late '00s. It doesn’t eliminate in person queuers, but it does reduce the number needed.
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I’d move VC way down based on the criteria you’ve outlined. VCs probably interact with among the most total people, but not within 6 feet for over 15 minutes. There’s check in at the start of the event, and then periodic check ins with people, etc.
It’s probably not the safest role from Covid POV based on the sheer number of interactions, but according to the definition at play, it’s definitely not #1
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I started volunteering (vice mentoring) FRC in 2019, and these are the three roles I’ve had (Field Sup 2 days unofficial, RI 4 days official, Queueing 5 official, 2 unofficial). I would definitely swap them, especially as practiced (without serious attempts to reduce close interaction for two official and two unofficial 2019 events, and no real concept of social distancing for the one official event I did in 2020 except for discouraging hugs/handshakes and using lots of hand sanitizer). Field supervisor definitely puts you in close contact with the field reset team, and probably refs and scorers, but probably not anyone else unless you choose to schmooze during matches. RI puts you in close contact with a handful of pits and a few other inspectors. Queing puts you in close proximity with most of the drive teams. Assuming I were to do the same roles in a COVID-threatening situation, here are the changes that would make me feel more sanguine:
- General precautions- checking vaccination records, requiring masks and social distancing, offering outside eating, optimizing HVAC to increase fresh air intake/exhaust and circulation over energy savings.
- Lowering the population density - limiting the number of people per team, increasing the area (meaning spreading people out field side, in the queues, in the pits, and in the stands), with particular emphasis on allowing space between teams and volunteers (including inter-team and inter-volunteer). I’d go far enough to suggest a total reverse on the “saved seat” rules, and designate seating areas for each team (randomly chosen, with some designated scouting/press areas for the teams in each match reasonably near the field, but not in close contact with field crew).
- (added) Make it Not-So-Loud. Normally, I’m totally there with reasonably loud music, dancing, and cheering. During an aerially trasmitted pandemic, we need to be able to communicate without breathing so hard.
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Yet again, I’m going to hype FIRST Mid-Atlantic’s Off-Season Plan. Their “Option 1 (COVID Restrictive” plan calls for a 10’ neutral zone around the field for field volunteers and 10’x10’ queueing areas for teams. FMA has been really forward thinking about not just protecting the teams, but also limiting their volunteer exposure and field-area risks. This is obviously also coming with the caveat of it being an off-season event, so Robot Inspectors and Pit Judges aren’t a factor that have to be worried about.
In terms of a full FRC season, I would hope that FIRST considers options similar to FMA’s for field-side volunteers, and looks for ways to make some of the other volunteer positions either fully remote or at least asynchronous. A lot of judging and interviews can definitely be conduced remotely. I have mixed feelings about Robot Inspection-via-Zoom (especially for size, weight, and pneumatics), but certain parts of the checklist could probably be run ahead of the event. Even positions like DJ and Game Announcer could potentially be done remotely (or at least moved far away from other field-side and scoring table volunteers).
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To add to your list, FTAA is probably right under FTA as in that role I can’t remember not interacting with every drive team at some point in the event.
Inspection-by-teleconference, or even inspection-by-honour-system, can happen, but FIRST needs to be really clear about what they want out of the inspection process (and attempt to earn community consensus well beforehand). Is there an acceptable rate of cheating? An acceptable rate of missed technical details? Are we at the point where we can talk openly about quantifying these ills, or are they still taboo to protect the reputation of the process?
To be completely rational about it, there might also be acceptable risks of communicable disease, but these are a lot harder to talk honestly and openly about, so if they remain unstated, I understand.
Inspection is many things (for fairness, for education, for safety, etc.), but we can trade them off in the name of public health if we're prepared to weigh and accept the consequences.
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The CDC definition needs revision.
I don’t know that I’d be comfortable with this at a competition, to be honest. In remote competitions, sure, if something happens to the robot, someone, or something else, and it would have been prevented had an actual inspector taken a look at it, that’s on us and it’s entirely our issue to deal with. At an in-person competition, there’s other people, other people’s robots, and a nice venue your local organization is renting out. I would at least want a “sanity check” inspector to take a brief look if we’re doing honor system inspections.
Ideally, zero. That’s not realistic at all, but hopefully it could at least be mitigated. In general, I do think most teams tend to act in good faith and while we (as in FRC teams in general) do have a reputation for figuring out how to stretch the rules, there’s a very clear desire to stay within them.
I think this depends on which technical details get missed. If it’s something like using the wrong kind of plywood in bumpers or even using a motor that hasn’t been legal since 2004 or something, fine, that’s not going to actually hurt anyone, physically or otherwise. If we get into issues that affect safety or give teams a competitive advantage, that’s a problem.
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I would say that in general, Referees would probably end up with 5 contacts meeting the CDC definition for “Close”, those 5 being the other referees. There’s certainly a risk that they end up with more (Official Scorers being the primary use case, if they’re used, with the gate-operating Field Reset crew members being the secondary). I think with some mitigation you can lock that at 5 close contacts. There’s just one problem with that micro-bubble: The Head Referee.
See, the Head Referee starts the day with the VC, LRI, JA, FTA (and possibly FTAAs), FS, RD(s), Event Manager, and a few other people in a meeting. Assume that each and every person in that meeting is a close contact of everybody else in the meeting, because it happens every day and often goes over 15 minutes, in a private area off to the side of the event. So there’s a bubble of at LEAST 8 people, all of whom are critical to the event, all of whom often do multiple events, any one of whom could get the disease.
Referee: 4 contacts that are probably clean, 1 at high risk.
Head Referee: 4 probably clean contacts, 8 contacts at varying risks from low (VC) to high (LRI and FTA). And that’s JUST the volunteers: Assume 8 more contacts at unknown risk (Alliance Captains), and probably about 5-10 close contacts that may or may not overlap with the AC group due to use of the Question Box.
Incidentally… I’ll bet some of you saw that meeting note I made earlier, and are now thinking “uh-oh”.
For those that aren't...
Hypothetical scenario: Little Johnny on FRC666 catches an asymptomatic case from an unknown source, and it isn’t detected before he attends the Magnolia Regional. Johnny helps get the robot through inspection, and due to a particularly annoying rules issue Inspector Jim brings in LRI Bob to help out, both being close contacts of Johnny due to the time working on the issue. Note that LRI Bob and most of the KVs are scheduled for events for the next two weeks.
LRI Bob goes to the KV meeting the next morning. At this point, nobody knows that Johnny had our contagious little friend. LRI Bob also goes the morning after that. Nothing’s showed up yet. The KVs interact with their teams of volunteers.
A couple days after the event, Johnny gets tested for some reason and it comes back positive. A contact trace is activated. Jim and Bob get tested. Positive. The KVs are alerted. They go to get tested. At least half show positive. Let’s say it’s the FTAA, the CSA, the LRI, the Head Ref, and the Field Supervisor.
This, my friends, is the nightmare scenario. If you haven’t nearly freaked out, you should be. Remember I said that most of the KVs are probably doing another event shortly? Not any more! And a smart KV who didn’t test positive will still hole up for a couple weeks (in case the test timing was off). At this point, your best assumption is that every single team had an interaction with someone who is somewhere in the chain of positives, and probably about half the volunteers did too.
Unless you’re in Texas or Florida, that’s it for events for at least the next two weeks and probably the rest of the season. Nobody’s going to be silly enough to allow one. Even if enough people and teams are functional to play one. Even Texas might take note and do a shutdown. All because one person’s contact chain led right through the KV meeting.
That meeting has Nate’s 1, 3, 4, 7, and 8, possibly 6, 11, and 10. Maybe a few others (15 comes to mind). That’s 8 close contacts immediately for everybody at the meeting.
Of course, there’s a few easy mitigations: Meeting gets held outdoors (outside the venue) or on the field, or not at all (HAH!), or via a Zoom. That should take the contacts from it to near-zero, allowing the KVs to worry about their normal interactions. Ditto for the AC meeting (held on the field), the spread-out-and-holler situation should work for that just fine.
Final score for the Head Ref: 5 low-risk, and with proper mitigation in the required meetings, and some creativity around the Question Box(es), I think you could get down to another 5 medium-to-high risk.
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HR (and often times, the refs), FTA and LRI have a long contact with all the drive teams in the “coaches” meeting.
Some very good thinking in this thread so far. Do you think FIRST is doing this analysis and looking for mitigations? Why or why not?
Who knows… they haven’t communicated anything along those lines! The best thing FIRST can do is maximize communication. I would love to hear their current plans, their contingency plans, and their contingency plans for their contingency plans.
Everybody and their grandmother understands that things can change dramatically from month to month. We won’t harbor hard feelings if FIRST changes their policies as the conditions of the pandemic change.
I don’t think it’s too much to expect regular communication from HQ at this point. Teams are going to be asked by their stakeholders as to how things are going to go this year… it would be great to have something to tell them.
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Yes. Simply put, I’ve had discussions like this with individuals that have direct input into these sorts of plans. I would expect every key volunteer to be talking with their local VC’s (who would then communicate it up the chain to HQ) or with their area’s chief (Like Big Al/Chuck for LRI’s).
I can also say that a year or so ago, when we didn’t know if the 2021 season was going to happen or not, I provided direct input into what it would look like to do inspections at least partially virtual - which steps we could do virtual, which ones we would really still want to be in person. So it’s something that’s been considered, but obviously not used yet.
I think it’s fine (right now) for FIRST not to have announced any plans. Team registration isn’t open yet, volunteer registration isn’t open yet. When announcing something like covid plans, you run the risk of things changing. Sure, we all know that and are fine with it… but when you change published plans, especially for something on the scale of FRC, you run into a problem of people looking at the wrong version. I can’t tell you the number of times LRI’s or HR’s have had to deal with teams bringing up kick-off rules that have since changed or been clarified by the time we get to the event. This would be no different - if covid rules were announced in June, before the delta surge started, those rules would look a lot different than they do now. This isn’t something we should be rushing to get rules out on. Give them to us a week or two before registration, and I’ll be happy enough. It’ll be plenty of time for me to compare their plans to my school’s plans, bring any concerns to the administration, and figure out a plan for registration.
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Basically every off-season event has been conducted using an honor system for robot inspection. There’s the caveat that the majority of robots passed inspection sometime during the official season, but I think anyone who’s been to enough off-season events has witnessed a post-season modification or practice bot that wouldn’t have passed inspection.
While a zero cheat utopia would be nice, I think we all know now that even under more stringent inspection requirements there are still honor code rules and instances of “creative interpretations” of rules. We have nothing beyond a student and mentor signature that enforces that teams didn’t violate pre-season work rules or modify their motors.