💕I am the mother of a medically fragile child with special needs who is a childhood cancer survivor. I want to take limited risks when it comes to exposing him to COVID-19. Despite the fact that he, my husband, and I are all vaccinated, we’d rather not roll the dice on how his sensitive immune system, which isn’t 100 percent, would respond to a breakthrough case.

😷Our team at The Inspi Lab, expected conference attendees, and our event speakers include many moms of children who aren’t able to be vaccinated. We want to protect our most vulnerable, which in the case of the Delta variant, is children who are too young or too sick to get the vaccine.

🤒On top of that, there seems to be an endless list of local friends and family who are either experiencing breakthrough COVID cases and/or being exposed and therefore doing a 10-day quarantine. I know of four moms who had to quarantine their kids less than one week into the school year.

🚫The conference hinges heavily on my ability to be healthy and available for three full days. Then, per guidance from my son’s doctor, it would be best if — after all that exposure to hundreds of people — I wasn’t around Oliver for 3-5 days. Then I’d get tested and then, if negative and symptom-free, I’d return to my normal day to day. This means I’d be away from Oliver for at least a week, possibly more, which is far from ideal in the context of his medical needs.

🏢Hundreds of people, inside, for more than 6 hours each day presents significant risk of COVID exposure (even if participants are masked, vaccinated, and/or have a recent negative test). Conferences aren’t like weddings or church services because they go on for many hours and are difficult to hold outside or in open-air settings.

👩🏻‍💼We have a staffing crisis in the service industry in our community. We’d want to make sure every event attendee has an exceptional experience, which is what you’ve rightly come to expect from The Inspi Lab. But we can’t guarantee that right now. Our convention center recently had a banquet for 600 people and requested 50 contract staffers for the event. 15 showed up.

📉 With more than 30 sponsors and 30 speakers and an event team close to 10, we’d need almost 75 people to be totally healthy, not caring for someone who is sick or quarantined, and themselves not in quarantine, for the entire duration of the event. The statistical probability of that right now is low. It might be better in November, but we have to make decisions with the current available data and our community spread is very high right now.

 👀 At any time the state or local government could decide to implement capacity limitations again, and although the convention center is large, it would create serious challenges if we had to figure out a last-minute pivot to comply with that type of regulation.