Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has flagged the global risk from the new coronavirus as very high given current spread of infectious disease. With more than 89,000 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 disease and over 3,000 deaths across the globe, the virus raised some serious concerns in several high travel countries.
Not even a single corner of the global economy is immune to the spread of Corona Virus, the outbreak has already affected global supply chains and consumer demand and now it is spreading its wings by affecting many of the global events. Most of the events are doing this on a precautionary measure by relying more on telecommuting, video conferencing and digital collaboration technology, and less travel.
With the growing concerns over the spread of corona virus, global events industry has started experiencing travel bans, laws banning large gatherings, or an abundance of caution, officials are being canceling, postponing, or converting tech events to virtual conferences.
Although many of the events are still on their track and most probably take place as planned but some of the event organizers have already take a decision to either postpone their events or cancel them to avoid this epidemic.
Facebook has cancelled its F8 events in light of the growing concerns around COVID-19 to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees and everyone who helps put F8 on. However, they are planning to replace the in-person F8 event with locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content that will be announced eventually in the future. You can keep an eye on these details here.
Shopify Unite 2020 developers conference canceled the onsite event as they will be taking it online. Apart from Shopify’s event, tech events such as Google Cloud Next, Adobe Summit, Nvidia GTC – GPU Technology Conference, Domopalooza, Microsoft MVP Global Summit, Salesforce World Tour Sydney and F5 Agility 2020 have been moved to online platforms and they will be held as online events.
The events which got canned this year due to the Coronavirus outbreak includes; Google News Initiative Summit, Black Hat Asia 2020, Paris Blockchain Week Summit, EmTech Asia, Game Developers Conference (GDC), Facebook Global Marketing Summit, Cisco Live Melbourne, and Mobile World Congress MWC Barcelona.
Whereas, most of the events went ahead as planned, but big companies like Twitter, IBM, AT&T and Verizon have withdrawn their presence from prominent events.
