Originally published at: Second U.S. person with omicron was at an NYC anime convention with 53,000 people | Boing Boing
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If I was was living in the hudson valley again, I would have seriously considered going to it (probably mostly for the Hololive panel). Scary stuff. Every single video I seen of it the past few weeks were of people being packed wall to wall. Folks were really looking forward to blowing off some steam by weebing out after a pretty crappy year and a half.
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Why are conventions going on in the middle of a pandemic!!! They went ahead with both Dragon*Con and AWA here in ATL, and it’s like WHY?!?
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I’m tempted to say “not news” as this was bound to happen.
It was merely a matter of minor details as to which city, which large gathering, etc.
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The L.A. Comic Con starts tomorrow. I wonder how much overlap in attendance there is with the NY attendees.
When they last held it in 2019 there were over 123,000 attendees so things certainly might get interesting.
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Maniacally scrubbing my face masks in boiling water while laughing like a mad man.
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Finally, an appropriate place to use this gif with regard to lax covid standards
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Money.
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I wonder if that image was created before or after this particularly violent Robot Chicken sketch?
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Cue up the idiot anti vaxxers who will trumpet the fact that this person was vaccinated and completely ignore the fact that he only had mild symptoms.
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By the way, the attendance numbers of the event was similar to a big late season NFL game. According to anime news network around 53k people attended the con (link). The average NFL game attendance is around 65k people (link). This is bad really news for the league during the late season if a smallish event like this convention could have been affected that easily.
Finally, a vague reason to post this tweet on BB hahah.
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My brain first read that as “scrubbing my face in boiling water” and thought, “might be a bit extreme, but Papasan is gonna Papasan.”
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That is an excellent question. Over here every large scale event like that is cancelled.
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I mean stats are stats. This is going to happen no matter what. I’ve been spending the past 15 days around at most 10 people at once in a grocery store, and I’m waiting on a COVID test because I have mild symptoms (and two vax shots plus booster). Highly unlikely isn’t zero.
So I’m cool with conventions coming back even though there are risks, because I’m slightly selfish and there’s no real end to COVID for the next ten years at the rate things are now. I don’t think asking us to forgo things we love for a decade or longer are really going to be healthy, and I don’t think we’re going to eradicate covid, so what other choices do we have? Even assuming that the US were 100% vaccinated, that’s great, we bought out way to the front of the lines globally and the rest of the world is still at around 54.6% vaccinated (mostly from lack of vaccine) and developing low income nations are still around 6% and are only getting one dose at this time. (source: Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccinations - Statistics and Research - Our World in Data) .
Like I said, if I end up having COVID, I’ve been around 10 people at most over the past 14 days. And it still would have gotten to me. That conventions have a few cases shouldn’t surprise anyone, hell , we have a term for it, “Con crud.”
You guys literally held Spiel in Essen in October 2021 and had 93,000 people show up.
Edit:
I was wrong, in January 2021 they announced that Spiel would be held in OCTOBER with masks and vaccines required. It was held in october, not January.
Honestly, I think with regards to some fan-run conventions, the answer is probably economic in nature. The budget for something like D*Con is probably year to year, and losing momentum might mean losing their contracts for hotels downtown…
But in a civilized society, you’d be able to put off such gatherings until it was safe…
That’s not the same thing and you know it. Over 800,000 people have now died of this thing, in just under 2 years. I doubt ANYONE has died of “con crud”… FFS.
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I was more referring to the fact that viral infections spread at conventions like, well, viruses. And that we shouldn’t be surprised at it happening in general cases, much less in the middle of a pandemic.
And that’s why they should not be holding them in person! FFS. This is NOT something that HAS to happen. It sucks not being able to go to things we enjoy, but you know… maybe human life means more than getting to see your favorite writer or actor… 
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