June 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many events this year, including the ability to hold major scientific, medical and business conferences in their usual formats. In response to most people’s inability to travel long distances and the inadvisability of many thousands of people gathering under one roof, conferences including ASCO, BIO, and more are going digital – internet streaming key sessions and making recordings of many available “on demand” to conference registrants. This move has had both positive and negative effects.
On the positive side, by putting the meetings online, many more people can “attend” important presentations due to much lower expense and the lack of need to travel, sometimes internationally, to the event. Moreover, those who normally go to the conferences “in-person” can access a greater number of sessions than they can usually accommodate when multiple competing events demand their attention for a single time slot.
