I could be wrong, but I worry that the decision late yesterday (bit.ly/38g8rhS) to move forward with the #croi2020 conference in Boston may not have been the right one from a public health and pandemics management standpoint, given
1. Thousands of people will be coming together from all around the world for several days together at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston and staying at the same hotels at and around the convention center.Some attendees will be coming from areas where community transmission may
have been happening for some time, others will be coming from places where there is currently no evidence of @covid-19 activity.
2. This creates the possibility of people becoming infected at #croi2020 and, on return to their home countries, seeding new outbreaks in areas where they don’t currently exist. This would include countries with very weak health infrastructure and high a prevalence of persons who
are more vulnerable to bad @covid-19 outcomes (I.e, large numbers of immunocompromised persons in countries with a higher prevalence of HIV).
3. Part of the decision appears based on the fact that, "Public health authorities in the U.S. and in Massachusetts continue to indicate that the risk to the general public of acquiring COVID-19 is low." I personally don't think we know this with any certainty, given that there
has not been adequate testing. But even if you take that statement as true, this seems like a decision to accept low risk of an extremely bad outcome of seeding new outbreaks in vulnerable places.
I am frankly surprised that the Boston Health Department and the Massachusetts State Health department permit this kind of large, international gathering to take place given that we are still supposedly in 'containment mode'. I wonder what @WHO would say.
4. The #croi2020 meeting is a premier scientific meeting of national and global scientific and public health leaders. If some of them were to become stuck in quarantine, in the US or elsewhere in transit, this could have a negative effect on their home institutions, jurisdictions
, and communities they serve.
5. I imagine the #CROI2020 organizers have weighed some or all of these things, and that it is a decision that weighs the importance of the above risks against the importance of disseminating the latest HIV science to those who need to know. Also important for public health.
