NEW YORK: A foreign policy think tank’s meeting on coronavirus scheduled for Friday in New York was canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak in the city, a report said.
The roundtable dubbed “Doing Business Under Coronavirus,” which was set to be hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations was one of several conferences canceled by the group amid the spread of the virus in New York, Bloomberg reported.
Mayor de Blasio on Tuesday said 36 people in the city have tested positive for the virus, an increase of 16 from yesterday.
A number of events have been canceled in the city as officials try to thwart the spread of the virus, including the New York City half marathon and the New York International Auto Show.
The auto show, originally scheduled for April with expectations to draw close to a million visitors, will now be held in the late summer — from Aug. 28 to Sept. 6, 2020.
“We are taking this extraordinary step to help protect our attendees, exhibitors and all participants from the coronavirus,” said Mark Schienberg, president of the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, the organization that owns and operates the New York Auto Show.
On March 9, Nido2020, the official meeting of the International Nidovirus Symposium, was postponed to 2021. The meeting, which happens only once every three years, was set to take place this May 10 to 14 in the Netherlands.
CFR has also canceled other in-person conferences that were scheduled from March 11 to April 3, including roundtables in New York and Washington and national events around the U.S.
“Nidovirus” is an order of viruses that includes coronaviruses, like SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus going around now), SARS-CoV (severe acute respiratory syndrome, which emerged in 2003), and MERS (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, which emerged in 2012). The order also includes arteriviruses, a group that can infect horses, pigs, monkeys, and mice; and roniviruses, a group that can infect shellfish.
The 14 previous nidovirus symposiums have functioned like any other scientific meeting: Attendees would present research, find collaboration opportunities, and get to know other members of a relatively small field within microbiology. In an email sent to Quartz on Feb. 28, Kikkert said she and the planning committee were hoping they could avoid canceling the meeting in order to exchange as much information as possible—especially about the new coronavirus circulating.
The group is still trying to figure out if they can share information remotely sometime in May, although it would be a challenge because some of the attendees were planning to come from China; time differences complicate the scheduling.
Normally, about 150 to 200 scientists attend the meeting, according to Bart Haagmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, who was also planning the meeting. Kikkert hopes that, by postponing the physical meeting, the conference next year can have even more attendees.
(with inputs from Agencies)
Comment