As the coronavirus and its COVID-19 disease spread, advisors going to industry conferences over the next few weeks and months should consider some simple guidelines to gain protection.
As the CDC advised, masks won’t guard against investion. Frequent hand washing and staying 6 feet or more from others can help. The CDC offers more guidance on its website.
So far, here’s the conferences that have been cancelled:
Here’s a running list of notable tech conferences, which typically draw between 500 to 100,000 attendees a year, that have been canceled so far due to coronavirus:
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
Facebook Global Marketing Summit in San Francisco
Facebook F8 in San Jose, California
EmTech, Asia in Singapore
Google News Initiative Global Summit in Sunnyvale, California
Shopify’s developer conference, Unite, in Toronto
Google I/O in Mountain View, California
We’re finding it's still business as usual as most conferences have not been cancelled with some exceptions.
The Envestnet Advisor Summit is still set to go on as planned, despite concerns surrounding Coronavirus shuttering Facebook’s planned 5,000-person conference in San Francisco.
The Wealth Advisor reached out this morning for comment, asking, “If coronavirus becomes worse and cases are reported in Austin are you still planning the event?” We were told, “We'll continue to evaluate the situation but as of now the event is still on as planned.”
As WSJ reported today: In Spain, cancellation of the Mobile World Congress deprived Barcelona of its busiest annual event, after big companies including AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG pulled out. Organizers had forecast it would generate $546 million regionally and create more than 14,000 part-time jobs.
Natural Products Expo West, the world’s largest natural and organic foods and products trade show, initially chose to go forward in Anaheim, Calif., this week, even as it estimated that as many as 60% of the expected 87,000 attendees wouldn’t come. But late Monday, organizer New Hope Network called it off, planning to reschedule it sometime before summer.
Meanwhile, Vox reported:
Facebook is canceling an annual marketing conference it was planning to host in San Francisco next month over concerns about the new coronavirus — now officially known as Covid-19.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we canceled our Global Marketing Summit due to evolving public health risks related to coronavirus,” Facebook spokesman Anthony Harrison said in a statement to Recode.
The social media giant confirmed that it has scratched its plan to hold the event for 5,000 international attendees at the Moscone Center on March 9-12, as first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s the latest sign of how the outbreak, which has taken the lives of nearly 1,400 people as of Friday, is impacting business in the tech industry.
But the Facebook marketing summit is the first publicly reported example of an event in the San Francisco Bay Area being canceled due to the virus. While there are four cases of novel coronavirus in Silicon Valley, public health officials say that the handful of cases are contained to those who either recently traveled to Hubei, where the virus started, or had close contact with family members who did.
