I must have caught the travel bug because I’ve been back in the Central Standard Time zone for less than a week and I’m already set to take off again.
Within days of returning from Comic-Con, tickets for TwitchCon went on sale. Coincidentally, both conventions happen in San Diego, so I’ll be returning to the west coast this October to the very same convention center.
Maybe I’m just making up for lost time. Last July was the first time I’d been back to the San Diego Convention Center since 2018. Normally, I only take one vacation a year, but I think that my perspective on things has changed a bit since the pandemic. Carpe diem and all that.
Fortunately, the travel bug seems to be the only thing I’ve caught thus far.
One would think that, considering the last two years, Comic-Con couldn’t possibly be anything but a COVID-19 super spreader event. Quite frankly, the risk factor seems absurdly high. Five days of 100,000+ people from all corners of the country packing into lines and rooms for hours upon end. Most of them having gotten there by navigating crowded airports and sitting in metal tubes with re-circulated air.
The result: Of the hundred or so people in my Comic-Con line waiting group, at least four walked away from the convention with a confirmed case of COVID-19. It’s a testament to the power of vaccines that I didn’t catch a case myself as I had prolonged exposure to three of them at various points during the convention.
All things considered, I would say it was an acceptable result. Yes, people got sick and were down for a few days after the convention, but that was a pretty regular occurrence before the pandemic. Con-Crud has been around forever. There have been several times over the years that I’ve come home from San Diego with a nasty cough.
But will TwitchCon foster the same result?
Comic-Con took some pretty reasonable precautions to mitigate the spread of illness during the convention. Along with an indoor mask mandate, every attendee had to demonstrate proof of either vaccination or a negative COVID test. It’s debatable how effective the former policy was, but the latter at least stacked the deck by limiting the pool of people to those least likely to catch or spread the virus.
TwitchCon, as of now, is not applying either policy.
If I were to guess, I’d say that the lack of a mask mandate is a visibility issue. TwitchCon is a convention of people that broadcast themselves across the internet. They want faces and clean audio, neither of which are very compatible with masks.
As for vaccination verification, I presume that’s simply a cost-saving matter that Twitch, or their Amazon parent company, simply did not want to spring for.
A lot of people aren’t happy about this, and I’d certainly prefer if they too applied the same policies that Comic-Con did, but I have to admit that the science enthusiast in me is curious about how things will turn out.
Granted, it’s not a perfect comparison. Same convention center and probably a reasonable crossover of demographics, but TwitchCon is both a smaller and shorter affair than Comic-Con, so it has that in its favor when it comes to mitigating spread.
And while I’m not super thrilled about the idea of taking part in this experiment, I suppose I’ve pressed my luck thus far. May as well go all the way.
Carpe diem and all that.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and should probably look into getting another booster at least.
