The Pomona College class of 2025, photo-captured on the steps of Carnegie Hall on August 28th, 2021, image promptly shared on official Pomona social media accounts. ASSESSING risk is hard, and we can reasonably hope that setting up and photo-capturing the moment above did not result in any transmission of the COVID virus. Precautions were in fact taken: the students were assembled while wearing masks and were told to remove them just for the photo—and then to re-mask afterward. And admirably, Pomona requires that students be vaccinated. Put simply then: the amount of heightened COVID risk for the sake of capturing this photo, while greater than zero, was probably moderate, not extreme. Yet this relatively happy assessment almost certainly misses this mark on the low side, since the consequences of taking and circulating the photo are not limited to the event itself, meaning to the staging and taking of the photo. We must also consider the message conveyed by this event to the
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