Well the government experts certainly have a veto. If the Spanish authorities say we are not holding the Madrid meeting than the IETF opinion is moot.
But the converse doesn't hold. A go ahead from the local authorities is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for obvious practical and safety reasons.
On the practical side we have the fact that Madrid saying OK is useless if the US (for example) says no. There can't be a meeting if 50% of participants would have to spend 14 days in quarantine on the other end. Not happening. And there is a long lead time here. We need to know significantly in advance to hold a meeting.
On the safety side there is the fact that we have multiple government authorities that disagree and some of them are lying. In fact just about the only thing all governments seem to be agreed on is that other governments are lying. They just all claim it is not them.
So no, there is really no statement from any government flunky that is going to persuade me that it is safe to travel abroad. I am going to want to see multiple sources showing me that the actual mortality rate from COVID-19 is considerably less than 0.1% before I get on a plane in 2020 for any reason and substantially lower than that for an IETF. That could be because of a therapeutic, a vaccine or the original estimates being wrong, I don't care but I want to see hard evidence and from doctors that are not in the pay of any government.
On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:35 PM Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 17, 2020, at 18:23, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> As for well-defined criteria for deciding when it's safe to meet again, I suggest (as a strawman proposal):
It doesn’t matter what you propose. No one at IETF should make up the rules on when it safe to meet again. We are not health care or pandemic experts.
When a vast majority of (inter)national health organizations say it is safe to meet in the target country and safe to travel for the vast majority of the participants to/from that country, then we can meet again.
Just as we don’t want doctors to tell us when to use UDP or TCP, we shouldn’t be coming up with our own straw man proposals on pandemics and death rates.
Paul
