Image: Since COVID-19 hit the United States, disciplinary organizations have struggled with holding their meetings. Early in the pandemic, most of the organizations converted their meetings to virtual formats; for the last two years, many groups have tried to meet in person, but bad luck has hurt some of those efforts.
Consider the American Sociological Association. It will hold its annual meeting from Aug. 5 to 9. It will be the first time the association will meet in person since 2019. The sociologists were expecting 5,000 people to attend.
But the location of the meeting has raised some concerns. The ASA will meet in Los Angeles, where cases of the latest variation of coronavirus, the version that is super contagious, have been increasing. Public health experts have said people who are fully vaccinated are unlikely to get very sick if they get infected with the new variant of the virus. But people still don’t