Article content
Experts from the University of Alberta have teamed up to discover whether choir singing deserves its bad rap as a dangerous pastime in the era of COVID-19.
Ever since stories broke early in the pandemic about outbreaks and deaths in the United States and Europe traced to choir practices and performances, health officials have been worried.
In May, Dr. Deena Hinshaw described singing as a “high risk activity,” and in June, Alberta Health Services officials noted “singing as part of live performance can cause respiratory droplets to expel at greater distances, which can infect nearby people but also contaminate surfaces and objects.”
But Dr. Laurier Fagnan, a music professor at the Faculté Saint-Jean, said fears are not based on the science of singing, but on scary, high-profile incidents.
“No studies have been done to show that singing is any worse than speaking, and certainly not than coughing or sneezing,” said Fagnan, who is also president-elect of Choral Canada, representing 28,000 choirs with 3.5 million singers nation-wide. “There have been a lot of assumptions made and amplified, and policy makers have been looking at it and saying that singing is the worst thing you can do without any empirical data that singing is to blame.”
