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Let’s give Peter Burchard a warm welcome on his first day as president of USA Fencing! Peter was elected to the role in May and begins his term as president of... the board of directors today. The former president of the U.S. Fencing Coaches Association and member of the Referees’ Commission also is the founder of North Bay Fencing. Looking forward to the next four years, Peter!

PSA: UPDATE, 081220-- Wired has published a really good piece on this study that offers a couple of important points. I've linked to the piece and to my Twitter... thread on it in the comments below. ---You might see headlines about a study that is purported to have assessed different types of masks and particularly found those neck gaiters to be "worse than nothing." So, that's not what the study found or even truly examined. This study [linked in the first comment] was published in a journal called "Science Advances." Its real purpose is to illustrate the application of a pretty straightforward way of measuring droplet transmission through masks made of different materials--it's "proof-of-concept" that their setup for doing this works. It is not, however, proof of anything else. Here's why. They tested their process on 14 masks. For each mask, one person--the same person throughout--put the mask on and said a sentence 5 times. For each mask, this (same) person did this 10 times. For a subset of three of these masks, the authors added in three more people, so they also have data for transmission averaged across four people (including that one person they started with) for three masks types: surgical, one type of cotton mask, and bandana. They averaged the 10 test results for that one person and presented the results in a graph. That graph does *not* show that this one person's results for a gaiter were worse than "wearing nothing." The standard deviations overlap, so for this single person wearing this single kind of gaiter and saying the same sentence in 10 trials, it's about the same as if *this person* were wearing nothing. One catch among many: They also show how this person and the other three people transmit while wearing nothing. Turns out, the person they chose for testing all 14 masks is a Loud Talker or a Big Spitter or something, because the curve for that person is really, really different (higher) than for the other three people, whose curves cluster together. So, the one person who did all the mask testing for the 14 masks, saying the same sentence in 10 trials per mask, with only a sip of water in between, is also a Big Spittin' Loud Talker. Probably the PI [academic scientist joke]. This guy didn't even *himself* transmit the same on different days. Another catch: when you look at how the four people transmitted in each of the masks, there's no clear pattern for any of them. Some of them transmit more through one kind of mask than another. Sometimes, one of them transmits more than another through the same mask and other times, it reverses. Regardless, transmission in these comparisons was ****always reduced**** with a mask on. Yet another: When the values for all of this are log transformed, which removes some of the chaos from the data, the gaiter they used and "nothing" are almost identical. All the cotton stuff is pretty similar in performance. The only mask that really stands out as having a much bigger transmission inhibition effect is the N95. Which we knew. The other masks all do *something*, and none of them is "worse than nothing." Finally, the authors are extremely opaque about the materials in these masks. They call the gaiter a "fleece," but it's not what regular folks probably consider "fleece." From the picture, which is small, making the fabric difficult to discern, it looks like a single-layer shiny stretch fabric gaiter. The same applies for the other masks: it's not clear what the fabric is. There's one that they call "knitted" that is actually, I think, "knit" rather than something you made with knitting needles and yarn. At any rate, the masks are all singular examples, each the same mask used for the 10 tests in the one person who was the test subject. There is no information about whether the testing was standardized in some way, such as fit of the mask to the face, etc., or readjustment after each sip of water between the tests. One reason for that is likely that this study was not intended to test *these masks* or *these materials* per se but to demonstrate that this process could work to measure droplet transmission. A study designed to genuinely compare masks and materials would have included far more participants, a standardized approach to donning the mask, probably longer breaks in between tests and water sips, and more detail (or, really, any detail) about the masks themselves. The authors overreach, I think (and others agree) in drawing *any* conclusions about broad categories of masks based on this work. All of which is to say, this study likely shouldn't change much about what you're doing unless, of course, you're planning to set up a "low-cost" and "simple optical measurement" process to test masks. Edited to update number of masks (which does not include a "swath" that they also tested).

Walking back the opening announcement. Due to a change in Philadelphia's covid status FAP-CENTRAL will remain closed until probably August 1st. At this time we are still a go to open at FAP-North this Monday, July 6.

Classes will resume at FAP-Central and FAP-North on Monday, July 6th. Please check your email and the website for new safety protocols and possible schedule changes. Online classes remain available for those unable to join us in person at this time.