A petition has been created on change.org suggesting that indoor climbing gyms should be reopened despite the pandemic. The petition was launched by Marco Paco dell’Aquila, the manager of Rockspot in Milan, which claims to be the largest climbing gym in Italy. The text of the petition singles out a list of reasons why it would be safe to reopen this type of facility. First of all, climbing gyms typically have a large surface area – between 1,000 and 5,000 square meters – and are larger than ordinary gyms. Climbing is also neither a contact sport nor a team sport and rather characterized by interpersonal distance. The text of the petition indicates that no Covid-19 clusters were ever detected in Italy that could be ascribed to a climbing gym. The text also refers to the Washington Indoor Climbing Coalition (WICC), a U.S.-based group of gyms that collaborated with doctors and virologists and managed to get the climbing gyms to reopen in the State of Washington on Jan. 11.
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