Thoughts on the Holiday Party in the Wake of the COVID Outbreak

Last week I wrote about how great it was to see so many people at the lighting industry holiday party. That piece doesn’t age well a week later in light of the known COVID outbreak. As of yesterday, 31 people are known to have tested positive who attended the party. Personally, I have tested negative, probably due to my short stay.

I'm not an epidemiologist (I can't even spell it) so I won't try to hypothesize about the current rise in cases. What I will say as a layperson is that it feels like we're entering the phase of personal risk assessment. Vaccination with boosters provides good protection against severe illness. We'll (hopefully) soon have a treatment course.

After a year lived in locked down and then a year of a halting return to something almost normal, the sense I'm getting from friends and colleagues is that everyone is mentally exhausted by the pandemic. I personally am in a place where I need to live a more normal life for my own mental health, I'm just not built for staying home all the time (as much as I like the shed), but everyone is going to have to make their own assessment. Should we have large gatherings like the holiday party in relatively enclosed spaces? Probably not.

That said, this situation has been incredibly fluid, two hundred people came to the event because a week prior, we didn't see a major outbreak coming, but as we now know, NYC is where Delta and Omicron are coming together to party.

What does that mean for LEDucation? March is a lifetime from now in pandemic time, who knows? For the time being, I'm going to offer a series of options for my customers, from in-person meetings to factory visits to virtual presentations so that everyone can choose what to do based on their own comfort level. I don't see another way to navigate this right now.

Please get vaccinated, get your booster, wear a mask. I want you all healthy for 2022.