Originally Posted by kylemore

American physician here. We are coming up to the conference season, most academic medical conferences seem to be scheduled in the next few months. I usually attend 1-2 national conferences per year. One, which is occurring later this month, has already been canceled. The other, which is next month, has put attendees on alert that it might be canceled (at this point I would put sums of money down that it will be). My colleagues in other fields are having the same experience. One of the local medical schools announced they are restricting all nonessential faculty travel and instituting mandatory quarantines for people returning from level 2 or 3 areas prior to work. They have also begun preparation to move all classes online for the remainder of the academic year.

Any of my physician colleagues who have paid the slightest bit of attention (with relevant backgrounds, ID, EM with disaster management) are essentially saying the same thing. They are self reducing travel and exposure and have adopted a bit of grim fatalism that seems to be common in the medical field. All of us are hoping that the virus will somehow turn out to be containable, or the case fatality rate is massively exaggerated by a lack of testing (which is possible) but we have little evidence pointing in that direction.