Throughout the COVID pandemic, I have been an advocate for ensuring the events held by universities, including conferences, seminars and talks open to the general public, are safe and accessible. I have repeatedly called for events organisers and venue managers to do their best to make events COVID safe (mostly using Twitter/X to do so, but also sending emails to organisers).
As I wrote in a piece for Croakey this week, misinformation and lack of visibility about the continuing risks posed by COVID is rife across all sectors of life. As a consequence, fewer people are realising just how serious the risks are, even while new viral subvariants continue to emerge and medical research on the impacts of even ‘mild’ COVID infection (long COVID) is continually being published (see, for example, a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal ).
A review article in Nature Reviews Microbiology published at the beginning of 2023 contended that:
In addition to providing education on long COVID to the biomedical community, we need a public communications campaign that informs the public about the risks and outcomes of long COVID.
In the absence of government-run campaigns, have been doing my best to engage in public communication about COVID risk – including to my academic colleagues. Three months ago, I published a set of guidelines on this blog to help organisers ensure that their events would not become super-spreader occasions. These guidelines offer opportunities for event organisers to expand access and improve inclusion not only for people who want to avoid COVID infection but also those who are disabled, are carers, have little travel funding or live in countries where visas for travel to conferences are denied, or who want to reduce their carbon footprint.
Advocating for COVID safe and otherwise more accessible academic events is proving an ever more serious challenge in an information environment (even at universities) in which it seems to assumed that the worst of the pandemic is over and many protections for event attendees have either been dropped or are not adhered to. For example, ‘strong recommendations’ for people to wear masks to protect themselves and each other seem to be little observed.
Over the past year, I had seen many reports of academic events offering no online options for participation. I had heard of many conferences where people had tested COVID positive while attending or soon after returning home. But what is happening at the writers’ conference being held at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus in Vermont, USA, really alarms me. Reports have come through on Twitter/X about over 10% of attendees reporting COVID infections. Those infected are reporting that they have been given little support by the event organisers, have been sent home while ill and infected, and that the rest of the conference was continuing with few mitigations in place to protect those still on site.
Is this the future of academic conferences? Little care taken to protect attendees, covering over the harsh realities of what has happened to those who were infected, expecting people to leave immediately, even when they are very ill and pose a risk to anyone they may come into contact while travelling home?
It seems it is time to redouble my efforts to draw attention to these issues. We need to #MakeConferencesCOVIDSafe. The lives and health of academics and other knowledge workers (such as these talented writers) – across the age span and seniority levels – should not be placed in further jeopardy.
This Sociological Life 