• Evolving and late-breaking information, mandates, and best practices made it challenging to set up our summer team for success. The State of Georgia, the CDC, and the American Camp Association were finally able to get on the same page with their recommendations and mandates about how to run camp safely, but not until the past couple of weeks. The result was a delay in the development and communication of our mitigation plan and staff structure.
• Between concerns of some of our summer team, and of their parents, about working in a pandemic, and protocols such as being quarantined on-site at Glisson for the entire summer without a day away, we lost a significant number of staff (over 10%) since June 1.
• We knew we would need additional staff for support, for disinfection and procedures, and to buffer staff to whom the permission we’d previously granted to attend significant family life events would mean a break in their summer quarantine, requiring a delayed return to work to meet state guidelines for retesting. The inability to fill the positions vacated in the past two weeks means the loss of that crucial buffer needed to operate safely.

• Our best efforts to develop operational theory ran into reality. For three months we’ve been reading, learning, listening, and seeking expertise and understanding to know how best to run camp safely in a pandemic. Our best laid plans began to bump up against reality only in the past few weeks as we began to lean fully into opening camp, implementing the plan.
• The promised widespread availability of testing proved true – kind of. A variety of different types, reliability rates, and timelines for results make meeting our required testing policy for staff difficult. Multiple asymptomatic members of our summer team tested positive this past week, and over half our staff are still having to wait on test results, preventing our having certainty of fully adequate staffing and training.
• And the promised widespread availability of rapid testing never materialized, and what is available hasn’t overcome a 60% reliability rate, leaving us without a key tool to control the entry of the virus into the camp bubble.
• While we were excited when the idea of distancing by “cohort” at camp was advocated and approved, the reality of program activity scheduling and the resultant limited availability for some options created downstream problems for our efforts to ensure that mitigating the virus didn’t also mitigate the camp experience as well.
• With the rising incidence of confirmed cases (below), the possibility of a camper developing symptoms at camp and our having to send an entire living group of twelve campers home in adherence to our policy, became increasingly real.

• The number of COVID-19 cases has reversed the earlier decline in Georgia, and threatens to climb again. While we determined that we would give less weight to this factor since it has not been a significant consideration in our state’s reopening, an increased number of cases in the areas where our campers live is an environmental consideration that indicates increased overall risk.
• Neighboring states all around us in the southeast are experiencing reopening spikes.
• Because we draw campers from counties across north Georgia and beyond, this mixing of campers creates an increased risk of spread, according to the CDC’s best practices for camp operations. Avoiding contributing to spread is a responsibility we take seriously, especially in light of recent increases.