An update from the SSM committee on this year’s ASM in the light of Covid-19

Dear Friends and Colleagues

An update from the SSM committee on this year’s ASM in the light of Covid-19

I hope that you all – and your families and friends – are keeping as well as possible in these unprecedented times. As a committee, we wanted to send our very best wishes to everyone, and especially to those whose workloads and work pressures within public health have changed in response to the Covid-19 epidemic.

We also wanted to send an update on the 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting, scheduled to be in Cambridge in September. As you can imagine, we have been discussing this very actively with the Local Organising Committee. As with so many things, we are weighing up the risks of still proceeding with any plans for an in-person conference this year. With developments in this last week in March, things look very uncertain. We will keep you posted as things develop, and we have been informed that the costs of cancelling will not change between now and late May so please await a firm decision one way or another in the next few weeks. We are also very mindful of the heavy additional burdens on many of our clinical colleagues in Cambridge who have been playing such a vital role in the organisation of the conference up to now. Whatever we have to decide, I would like to take this chance to express our deepest thanks to the team in Cambridge for all the work that they have done to prepare for the conference up to this point in time. There is such a long lead-in to these events, and I know how much hard work and thought has already been expended by the Cambridge team. We really are grateful to them all for this.

In the meantime, we are going to go ahead with rating the abstracts as usual. We had a great response to the call. We are also exploring options for running all/part of the conference remotely. I’m sure you will all agree that with the pressures of the climate crisis and what will hopefully be a positive downturn in the amount that we all travel for work and for meetings in future, finding ways to attend conferences more effectively remotely is something that we will all need to explore – even if we don’t manage to organise this, with all the pressures of Covid-19, for the conference this year.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and we will update everyone with a final decision before the end of May. Please take care of yourselves, your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues in the meantime. There will certainly be some really important work ahead for our community when the dust settles, looking at impacts on human behaviours and physical and mental wellbeing, on inequalities, and on our relationship with the planet and the natural environment. Hopefully, there will be no-one in Britain who disputes the true value of our NHS and the people who work within it, wherever they live or were born. This is an important time for us to recognise and celebrate the amazing work that everyone does within the NHS, research institutions, virology labs, schools, etc.

These are extraordinary times, in which we are all having to cope with exceptional challenges. I am aware that some of these will be shared and some will be very different for everyone reading this message.

With all good wishes and take care,
Kate Hunt
SSM President