VIRUS WORRIES hit UA events.
Conference off; 2 job fairs still on
— A University of Arkansas, Fayetteville conference on blockchain technology has been postponed because of public health concerns related to the covid-19 illness.
The 2020 Blockchain for Business conference set for Friday will instead take place possibly this fall, UA spokesman David Speer said.
Industry leaders from Ernst and Young, Walmart and FedEx had been announced as speakers for the event that last year had Gov. Asa Hutchinson speak to attendees. Speer said a crowd of up to 300 had been expected.
“Due to public health concerns, we concluded that the most responsible form of action we can take is delaying the conference” until a later date, Kathryn Carlisle, senior managing director for the UA Blockchain Center for Excellence, said in a statement to attendees. UA released her statement to the Democrat-Gazette.
Tasks for organizers include “quickly deciding on a date” for the rescheduled event, Carlisle said in the statement.
Other events requiring people to travel from afar to the Fayetteville campus seemed mostly unaffected by ongoing concerns about the covid-19 illness. No cases of covid-19 have been identified in Arkansas, but the illness has been detected in 34 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two job fairs for students scheduled for today and Wednesday at Bud Walton Arena have not been canceled, though a few companies are no longer planning to attend.
Angela Williams, executive director for the UA Career Development Center, said in an email Monday that
three companies “listed company restrictions on traveling due to the coronavirus outbreak as their reason for the cancellation” of their participation at a Wednesday event for science, technology, engineering and mathematics students. UA has said more than 100 companies registered to attend the Wednesday event.
The Tuesday event, known as the Business Career Fair, had 121 companies signed up to attend before 15 cancelled, Speer said.
“Most of those are because their companies have travel restrictions at this time,” Speer said.
More than 150 students gathered Monday to hear a talk from Danish architect Dorte Mandrup at Vol Walker Hall on the UA campus.
No formal coronavirus travel alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been issued for Denmark. The World Health Organization’s website listed 36 cases of the covid-19 illness as of Monday. The country has a population of about 5.8 million, according to statistics kept by the Denmark government.
“I’m happy I’m in a safe zone. I think nobody in Arkansas has any sign of virus,” Mandrup quipped at the start of her talk.
The university on March 3 announced it was discouraging travel by faculty members from the U.S. to international destinations, with guidelines updated Friday also discouraging international travel “especially to countries with a CDC risk level for coronavirus of 2 or higher.”
The university also stated it “would be advisable to discourage such visits” to the campus from visitors who would be arriving from countries with a CDC coronavirus alert at Level 2 or higher.
A mathematics conference on topology and geometry began and ran through Sunday on the UA campus, with invited speakers from various universities, including Rice University and the University of California-Berkeley.
“The conference went as scheduled with only one change. The participant from Oxford [England] did not attend as a precautionary measure,” Matthew Clay, a UA associate professor of mathematics, said in email.
There are no formal CDC coronavirus travel alerts for the United Kingdom, where the World Health Organization lists 277 identified cases of covid-19 illness.
Steven C. Lupien, interim president for BeefChain, said in a phone interview that he had planned to travel from Wyoming to Fayetteville to speak at the UA conference on blockchain technology.
“This is the third conference that I was speaking at that was postponed,” Lupien said. “I wasn’t the least bit surprised.”