I’m sure no one here remains unaware of the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. My goal with this post is to help meetup organizers help their communities deal with this situation. I know that some communities have already preemptively canceled events, and that others live in areas that have already been hit hard enough that this message is too little, too late. I hope that those of you in the latter situation are staying safe.
When should we stop having meetups?
I recommend that you stop holding meetups immediately, regardless of your location. It’s abundantly clear that containment measures have failed, so even if your city isn’t currently in crisis, it’s unlikely that that will remain the case for long. At this point, we should be aiming to “flatten the curve” – that is, to slow the spread of the disease so that hospitals don’t have to operate above capacity for long periods. If we can achieve this, a greater proportion of ill people will have access to professional medical care, which will reduce mortality rates.
If you are adamant about waiting to suspend your meetups (maybe you live somewhere remote and sparsely populated with excellent testing protocol… but probably not), this spreadsheet provides a crude mathematical model to calculate risks from holding gatherings, based on the confirmed COVID-19 cases (or deaths) in your area and the size of your gathering. I encourage you to reach out to me directly if you are thinking of continuing to hold events going forward; it’s my impression that this is currently just a bad idea, but I’m open to talking one-on-one about your particular situation.
What can I do for my community?
How can I help my community prepare for COVID-19?
Not holding events is a good first step, of course. For more on what to do, I suggest bit.ly/covid-preparedness. This is a document about how to prepare for a COVID-19 pandemic, and while I am not a domain expert, the document is open-source and provides citations, which means you can assess the evidence for yourself and suggest corrections if you think anything is wrong.
Here is a bulleted list of priority interventions:
Educate your community about proper hygiene and social distancing.
Make sure that everyone in your community has stocked up on essentials (food, medications, toilet paper, etc) to reduce the chance that they’ll need to visit a store during a time when doing so is likely to endanger their health.
Make sure that everyone in your community has a plan for what to do in the event that they or someone in their household contracts COVID-19.
How can I keep my community connected when we can’t meet in person?
I’ve created a Discord server so that you can keep the conversation going even when you can’t meet in person! We can create separate channels for each different group, and it should be easy to have voice or video calls over Discord at your normal group meeting time. (I’m a Discord noob, but I think it should be possible to make channels private as well.) Regular meetup organizers will be made admins, and I’ll be available to help set things up if you have questions.
This is the invite link to the server: https://discord.gg/hfyRcfk. You can send it out to everyone in your meetup group (it’s set to not expire). And please let me know if you’d like to help moderate the server!
Additional resources
There are thousands of COVID-19 resources floating around out there, and at this point it’s really hard to orient to all of them. The LessWrong team has created a database where they are attempting to aggregate all of these resources and present them in a comprehensible, user-friendly way.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns, and please try to stay safe!
Meetups in the era of COVID-19
I’m sure no one here remains unaware of the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. My goal with this post is to help meetup organizers help their communities deal with this situation. I know that some communities have already preemptively canceled events, and that others live in areas that have already been hit hard enough that this message is too little, too late. I hope that those of you in the latter situation are staying safe.
When should we stop having meetups?
I recommend that you stop holding meetups immediately, regardless of your location. It’s abundantly clear that containment measures have failed, so even if your city isn’t currently in crisis, it’s unlikely that that will remain the case for long. At this point, we should be aiming to “flatten the curve” – that is, to slow the spread of the disease so that hospitals don’t have to operate above capacity for long periods. If we can achieve this, a greater proportion of ill people will have access to professional medical care, which will reduce mortality rates.
This popular article makes a good case for acting now.
If you are adamant about waiting to suspend your meetups (maybe you live somewhere remote and sparsely populated with excellent testing protocol… but probably not), this spreadsheet provides a crude mathematical model to calculate risks from holding gatherings, based on the confirmed COVID-19 cases (or deaths) in your area and the size of your gathering. I encourage you to reach out to me directly if you are thinking of continuing to hold events going forward; it’s my impression that this is currently just a bad idea, but I’m open to talking one-on-one about your particular situation.
What can I do for my community?
How can I help my community prepare for COVID-19?
Not holding events is a good first step, of course. For more on what to do, I suggest bit.ly/covid-preparedness. This is a document about how to prepare for a COVID-19 pandemic, and while I am not a domain expert, the document is open-source and provides citations, which means you can assess the evidence for yourself and suggest corrections if you think anything is wrong.
Here is a bulleted list of priority interventions:
Educate your community about proper hygiene and social distancing.
Make sure that everyone in your community has stocked up on essentials (food, medications, toilet paper, etc) to reduce the chance that they’ll need to visit a store during a time when doing so is likely to endanger their health.
Make sure that everyone in your community has a plan for what to do in the event that they or someone in their household contracts COVID-19.
How can I keep my community connected when we can’t meet in person?
I’ve created a Discord server so that you can keep the conversation going even when you can’t meet in person! We can create separate channels for each different group, and it should be easy to have voice or video calls over Discord at your normal group meeting time. (I’m a Discord noob, but I think it should be possible to make channels private as well.) Regular meetup organizers will be made admins, and I’ll be available to help set things up if you have questions.
This is the invite link to the server: https://discord.gg/hfyRcfk. You can send it out to everyone in your meetup group (it’s set to not expire). And please let me know if you’d like to help moderate the server!
Additional resources
There are thousands of COVID-19 resources floating around out there, and at this point it’s really hard to orient to all of them. The LessWrong team has created a database where they are attempting to aggregate all of these resources and present them in a comprehensible, user-friendly way.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns, and please try to stay safe!