On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 05:56:31PM -0500, Kathleen Moriarty wrote: > Recent articles from scientific sources don’t have this focus anymore. > Essentially, the spread is pretty much inevitable at this point. > Death rates of the flu are .1% and Coronavirus are around/above 2%. > The article I shared had specific percentages for those with > underlying conditions like diabetes being at 14% and this hitting > those above 80 much harder. 2% is rather high, though perhaps it's much lower for the IETF participant demographic. Certainly people with higher-risk conditions should probably avoid travel, IMO. These diseases _tend_ to get less virulent as time passes, so perhaps it would be best to avoid travel for now. Mind you, I'm not going to any IETF meetings any time soon anyways, so for me, it's easy. (Then again, I travel plenty anyways.) > We’ll see how it evolves in the coming weeks. People canceling now > likely doesn’t help with refunds, but if restrictions are put in > place, that may change. Or maybe Italy and other nations will contain > it. Time will tell and we have a little. > > That said, I hope anyone with an underlying condition gets a refund. China has already taken massive economic losses. It seems likely that others will too. That may include the IETF/ISOC and participants -- the loss of revenue / travel expenses is quite minor in the grand scheme of things. Considering 2% of the value of participants' lives... Assume USD $2million/participant (a rather low estimate), say 1,000 participants (also low), and 2% of them dying as a result of attending (a crazy high estimate, but maybe appropriate worst-case estimate), which yields a loss of USD $40million. That must be in the ballpark for the costs to all participants to attend a meeting ($2,500 for lodging, $1,500 for airfarce and local transportation, plus registration fee, so less, but in the ballpark). Fiddle with those numbers -plug in better estimates- and see if that yields a higher cost of cancelation or losing people. I'm guessing most participants can absorb the loss of a cancelation (if the meeting were canceled) more easily than ISOC. Nico --
