I am sad about it, but I’ve decided to skip Gary Con.

It cost me a little bit of money. I’m out the badge money and $50 in fees from AirBnB but that’s sunk cost and a lot better than potentially passing COVID-19 to my 79 year old mother in law with asthma.

We’ve had some cases of COVID-19 pop up here in Cleveland. One of them was from someone going to a conference in Washington D.C.. There have been a number of new cases that came from business conferences in the last few weeks. Due to the nature of the virus, you can be spreading it around for several days before you get sick. Based on what I’ve read, the current federal guidelines about testing for the virus makes it very hard to get tested unless you’ve been out of country. As a result, there are probably a lot of people carrying the virus that aren’t aware of it.

The likely hood of getting the disease in your daily interactions is fairly low. However, put yourself in a room full of people who come from all parts of country, in close proximity to each other and your chances go up.

Maybe next year.