No Events For You or Me in 2020

By Robert McGarvey

Open your calendar. Search for events – conferences, conventions, trade shows and the rest – through 2020.  Delete them all. Every single one.

You aren’t going.

Nobody is.

Sure, the hyper-optimistic stupidity about a quick return to normalcy continues to pour out of the White House. Ignore it.  

There will be no return to normalcy until there is a vaccine and that isn’t happening until 2021, very possibly deep into 2021.

The impacts on large gatherings will be enormous – indeed catastrophic.

I had been more optimistic myself a few months ago, when I still envisioned personally attending late Spring events. All by now have officially been cancelled.

But there no longer is reason to think even fall events will happen.  Probably they won’t. There’s this from the Skift event manager blog: “the research uncovered how large events are at the core of how the virus spread. The Atalanta-Valencia soccer match, the Cologne Carnival. In the U.S., Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the whole of spring break in Florida are currently viewed as super-spreading events.

Masses of people in prolonged contact seem to be the obvious conduits for the virus’ spread.”

The piece refers to research by Prof Hendrick Streeck in Germany and it appropriately cautions that the research is in progress, that is, findings may change.

But for now the plain fact is that large group gatherings – in conference halls, churches, cruise ship dining rooms, even bustling hotel lobbies and of course airplanes and airport terminals – seem ideal breeding grounds for the virus.

The antidote is to stay away and that is what I will be doing.

Talk with people who have had what they believe was coronavirus and even the comparatively mild cases that I have heard first person stories about are miserable. A week or two of no energy.  In bed. Feverish. Weight loss of a pound a day seems typical and that’s for mild cases.

This is no flu. This often is a much more debilitating disease.

More severe cases of course entail ICU stays and possible death. There presently is no accepted treatment.

And there will not be a vaccine until well into 2021.  

Thus the headline on the AP story: “Virus Puts Event Planning Industry on Brink of Devastation.”

The frightening reality is that, really, 2020 is a wipe out for the industry.  Who knows how many small businesses – which the AP story points out are the engine for most events, from weddings to company picnics to convention center extravaganzas – will shutter and never reopen.  

That’s the other worry. Even once there is a vaccine, the events business infrastructure will be in tatters.  It cannot just pick up afresh.

My personal belief is that there will be a big, sweeping rethink of what it means to meet, and how and where.  I believe a longterm consequence of coronavirus and the associated economic recession will be a huge reconfiguration of meetings – and really it’s about time.  They aren’t much different from the first ones I attended a half century ago. Sure, there are Power Point shows, Skype call in guests, and a few other nods to technology.

But mainly a 2020 event is still a 1970 event and that makes no sense.

It’s time to rethink events.  Eliminate most in person events.  Add a new life to the in person events that survive.

It’s will be a brave new world and, honestly, it’s about time in the meetings world.

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H/T Joe Brancatelli.  There I was, pondering the mysteries of making a face mask as I planned a trip to the pharmacy across the street.  I do not sew. I have no construction or painter masks. And then I read Brancatelli’s reminder that the eye masks in airline amenity kits make dandy facemasks.  A quick search found a never opened Continental Air kit, also a Finnair kit and I was in business. No needles, no thread,.  Probably I have more such kits – which I pretty much never used but for some reason often took with me – so my mask problem is solved.