Eli from the EA Global team here: For anyone that has travelled to London for the conference, we will reimburse you for any extra travel or accommodation costs that arise should you be stuck in town due to contracting COVID-19 (e.g. if you have to stay in your hotel for an extra week and book new flights due to contracting COVID-19 at or slightly before the event).
You can see more information in our COVID protocol here, though please feel free to reach out to hello@eaglobal.org should you have any questions or concerns — thanks!
1400 EAG attendees. Currently about 7.5% in England have Covid, but if someone’s not symptomatic and not testing positive on an LFT they’d be much less likely to be Covid positive, so assume 1% of EAG attendees have Covid (14 attendees).
How many people will these 14 asymptomatic attendees infect? If no one were vaccinated and they were symptomatic, it could be something like 8 people each, but of course they’ll be less infectious and others will be vaccinated so perhaps they each infect 1.5 others on average.
So perhaps 21 people catch Covid at the conference. Of that, the majority are probably from the UK, so wouldn’t miss a flight. It also can take several days from initial exposure to developing symptoms and testing positive, so people flying out on Monday are perhaps less likely to miss their flight (though it’s still possible!).
Overall I’d predict 0-7 people miss their flights from Covid if EAG goes ahead as planned (my best guess is 2 people).
Note that I did no research for the above, but I hope all my assumptions are listed clearly enough that anyone could replace them with their own numbers!
Edit: Already caught one mistake where I didn’t carry my numbers through properly lol, fixed that
Your forecast seems plausible to me but on the lower end of what I’d have thought.
Attending a conference probably implies a lot more social mingling than the average Londoner is doing.
If a lot of vaccinated people are asymptomatic (at least initially) and LFTs aren’t very sensitive, would we expect a factor 7.5 reduction of conference attendees? I don’t have the figures to compare this with, but for instance, a factor of 5 doesn’t feel obviously wrong.
You say if no one were vaccinated, around 8 people would be infected on average? That seems low and like you went with the R0 of omicron in an unvaccinated population. But again, people are attending a conference. In a conference setting, even just one superspreader among the 8 people could infect >100 people if they were unvaccinated. I do think superspeaders are less likely in a triple-vaccinated population, but omicron ba.2 seems to be pretty undeterred by vaccination in some ways.
Incubation time is frequently <2 days with omicron, so you may have some people who get it at reception and infect more people on the last day of the conference. (I haven’t looked up whether the conference lasts 2.5 days or just 2 days, so that may also be relevant.) (On the other hand, some people may stop attending the conference once they feel unwell or if they take a second test and it’s now positive.)
FWIW, at the last EAG I saw people go to a crowded restaurant and then go back to the conference. If that’s done on the last day, it doesn’t matter. If it’s done on the first day, it may lead to more new infections.
Overall, I think >5% of attendees infected doesn’t seem implausible to me, but I would also put some probability on your number at the lower end. (With the nice weather, if people do most of their one-on-ones outside, I think that would reduce the risks by a lot!)
I also expect that the accounting will be complicated because of EAG afterparties or after events. Probably those will be riskier than the conference but the people who attend may already have had one of the omicrons and therefore be pretty safe, or they may not care about getting infected because they’re back to living life normally and EAG isn’t an inconvenient time for them to catch it.
I imagine the costs are higher for people who might miss flights, even if health costs are low!
Eli from the EA Global team here: For anyone that has travelled to London for the conference, we will reimburse you for any extra travel or accommodation costs that arise should you be stuck in town due to contracting COVID-19 (e.g. if you have to stay in your hotel for an extra week and book new flights due to contracting COVID-19 at or slightly before the event).
You can see more information in our COVID protocol here, though please feel free to reach out to hello@eaglobal.org should you have any questions or concerns — thanks!
What fraction of EAG attendees do you expect to miss flights because of COVID if the event proceeds as planned?
Oh, interesting forecasting question!
1400 EAG attendees. Currently about 7.5% in England have Covid, but if someone’s not symptomatic and not testing positive on an LFT they’d be much less likely to be Covid positive, so assume 1% of EAG attendees have Covid (14 attendees).
How many people will these 14 asymptomatic attendees infect? If no one were vaccinated and they were symptomatic, it could be something like 8 people each, but of course they’ll be less infectious and others will be vaccinated so perhaps they each infect 1.5 others on average.
So perhaps 21 people catch Covid at the conference. Of that, the majority are probably from the UK, so wouldn’t miss a flight. It also can take several days from initial exposure to developing symptoms and testing positive, so people flying out on Monday are perhaps less likely to miss their flight (though it’s still possible!).
Overall I’d predict 0-7 people miss their flights from Covid if EAG goes ahead as planned (my best guess is 2 people).
Note that I did no research for the above, but I hope all my assumptions are listed clearly enough that anyone could replace them with their own numbers!
Edit: Already caught one mistake where I didn’t carry my numbers through properly lol, fixed that
Your forecast seems plausible to me but on the lower end of what I’d have thought.
Attending a conference probably implies a lot more social mingling than the average Londoner is doing.
If a lot of vaccinated people are asymptomatic (at least initially) and LFTs aren’t very sensitive, would we expect a factor 7.5 reduction of conference attendees? I don’t have the figures to compare this with, but for instance, a factor of 5 doesn’t feel obviously wrong.
You say if no one were vaccinated, around 8 people would be infected on average? That seems low and like you went with the R0 of omicron in an unvaccinated population. But again, people are attending a conference. In a conference setting, even just one superspreader among the 8 people could infect >100 people if they were unvaccinated. I do think superspeaders are less likely in a triple-vaccinated population, but omicron ba.2 seems to be pretty undeterred by vaccination in some ways.
Incubation time is frequently <2 days with omicron, so you may have some people who get it at reception and infect more people on the last day of the conference. (I haven’t looked up whether the conference lasts 2.5 days or just 2 days, so that may also be relevant.) (On the other hand, some people may stop attending the conference once they feel unwell or if they take a second test and it’s now positive.)
FWIW, at the last EAG I saw people go to a crowded restaurant and then go back to the conference. If that’s done on the last day, it doesn’t matter. If it’s done on the first day, it may lead to more new infections.
Overall, I think >5% of attendees infected doesn’t seem implausible to me, but I would also put some probability on your number at the lower end. (With the nice weather, if people do most of their one-on-ones outside, I think that would reduce the risks by a lot!)
I also expect that the accounting will be complicated because of EAG afterparties or after events. Probably those will be riskier than the conference but the people who attend may already have had one of the omicrons and therefore be pretty safe, or they may not care about getting infected because they’re back to living life normally and EAG isn’t an inconvenient time for them to catch it.
This also seems like reason to encourage people to lobby their governments to get rid of testing requirements for travel
Thank you for the answer! Strongly upvoted.