At two weeks past the end of the con and most folks’ travel back home, we are now outside the incubation window for COVID-19 that could be plausibly related to the physical WisCon 2022 convention. We’d like to take this chance to give an overview of our COVID-19 safety measures, and their results. We hope sharing this information can be helpful not just to our own members as they continue to make decisions about their safety this year and up to the next WisCon, but also for any other organizations trying to hold safer events in the pandemic times.

The first question in COVID-19 safety considerations is whether an in-person event should be happening at all, and we’ve had some people ask about why we chose to hold one. Our answer, which is the same for many other cons in our situation, was that we had already committed to hold WisCon 2022 back in 2019 when we signed a contract with the Madison Concourse Hotel. It’s standard practice to sign these hotel contracts several years in advance to reserve the space, and WisCon typically signs ours two to three years out. These contracts specify very high penalties for cancellation, increasing as the date gets closer, with a few strict exceptions. One of those exceptions is an act of government that prevents the event from taking place. In Spring 2020, indoor gatherings were prohibited by local public health ordinance, allowing us to cancel the planned physical WisCon without penalty and instead hold a fully virtual event. In 2021, Dane County (where Madison is located and WisCon is held) still had some restrictions on large gatherings, but it may have been technically possible to hold an event with drastic changes to the format. However, we made it clear to the hotel that we would not be able to fulfill our 2021 obligations under those conditions. Because we have a very good relationship with the hotel, they very graciously did not charge us a penalty for cancellation and proposed a much smaller, non-WisCon event to help generate some revenue.

However, for 2022, there was no superseding ordinance. If we cancelled the event, the contract stipulated that we would owe the hotel much, much more money than WisCon or SF3 has, rendering the organization insolvent and ensuring that there would be no more WisCons ever. So our options were to try to hold the safest in-person WisCon we could— or never have any WisCons again. As it is, we will still owe the hotel a lot of money because the event we were able to have was still much smaller than the WisCon envisioned and expected when the contract was signed in 2019.

But! With very many thanks for your help to #SaveWisCon, between our fundraising and fulfilling a sizable portion of our 2022 obligation, we will remain solvent and have the resources to run another in-person con in 2023. We have specifically — and with much, much patience and grace from the hotel — held off on signing anything for 2023 until we could reasonably guarantee our own solvency and the safety of our members, and also until we saw how things went in 2022 so that we could negotiate for an appropriate size and obligation for WisCon 2023. The WisCon 2022 ConCom, the SF3 Board, and the hotel have been working together to put both WisCon and the hotel in a good position for next year.

As we were obliged to hold an in-person event, we wanted to make sure it was as safe as possible. The following measures were taken by the hotel, the ConCom, and the COVID-19 Safety Team in particular:

We truly believe that the hotel, the ConCom, our Online Con department, our COVID-19 Safety Team, our at-con volunteers, and our entire in-person membership did a great job working together to keep everyone safe! Thank you all so, so much!

Two weeks out from the end of the convention, we are stopping our case tracking efforts. While it’s impossible to say with any certainty whether some members arrived sick, contracted COVID-19 during travel to/from, or contracted COVID-19 at the con, we can, with much gratitude, report that we had a total reported count of 13 cases including one possible false positive, or 3% of our estimated 407 in-person attendance. That’s just about miraculous.

We want to especially extend our thanks to those who tested positive very soon after arriving and took the necessary measures to take care of themselves and keep those around them safe, up to and including leaving the convention entirely. We know it must have been so gut-wrenching and disappointing. Thank you.

Our COVID-19 reporting was sent directly to all members who had purchased an in-person membership, and sometimes included additional, voluntarily disclosed information such as names. An anonymized record of all 13 reported cases, including the possible false positive and location information, is available publicly at the link above.

Of the reported cases, a number cluster around the Governor’s Club Lounge, or the Governor’s Club Library. The Governor’s Club refers to floors 12 and 14 of the hotel, which require a specially coded room keycard to access. The Lounge is an open service bar located on the 12th floor that also serves breakfast, evening appetizers, and late night desserts, and requires the same keycard to access. (Note that this is a separate space from The Bar, which is a publicly accessible bar on the ground floor of the hotel.) The Library is a smaller room adjacent to the Lounge that serves tea and coffee, also requiring the same keycard. The Library and Lounge share a wall that has small decorative openings, meaning that the two rooms are not sealed off from one another and share some amount of air exchange, especially at the seating close by the wall on either side. While both of these spaces are popular with WisCon members, they are not WisCon-exclusive spaces subject to our masking and vaccination policies. In addition, other hotel guests were there, often taking different or no COVID-19 safety precautions, and many hotel guests staying on these floors (WisCon members or otherwise) bring other guests into these spaces.

In our (manifold) COVID-19 preparations and pre-con communications, we tried to stress that, because we expected to fill less of the hotel, there would be more non-WisCon guests at the hotel, not subject to our policies. We also can’t control what WisCon members, or any hotel guests, do in public spaces such as the lobby, non-WisCon-exclusive semipublic spaces such as the Governor’s Lounge, or private spaces such as individual guest rooms. Safety department volunteers, all three Con Co-Chairs, and additional ConCom members (as available) circulated in WisCon-exclusive spaces throughout the con and reminded members of our policies when necessary (in addition to members reminding each other), but WisCon had no power to do that in spaces not exclusive to WisCon, or in private spaces. This is a safety consideration that every in-person event, and every in-person event attendee, will have to negotiate for themselves.

Finally, one last wrench in the works: The federal mask mandate for air travel was repealed very shortly before WisCon 2022. This changed many people’s personal safety calculus on travel, and we informally heard from some registered members that they were not attending in person, as well as receiving some last-minute requests to change from an in-person membership to the cheaper online membership (in-person memberships include all online membership access). This made it hard to estimate our total in-person or online attendance in the end. However, this also caused a last-minute wave of cancellations or no-shows for reservations at the hotel. This can unfortunately result in financial hardship, as the rooms within the block we reserve for WisCon every year come at a specifically negotiated lower rate. Because of these specific terms, rooms in our reduced-rate block have a more stringent 14-day cancellation policy rather than the 24-hour cancellation policy on general reservations. This caused some members who planned to join us in person, but ultimately could not, to still be charged for the first night of their planned stay. The best we can do, and what we recommend for other events, is to very clearly communicate the specific policies and timelines for their event’s hotel(s) so attendees and members can make informed choices.

Ultimately, we wish there had been zero cases, that no one arrived sick, got sick during travel, or got sick while in Madison for WisCon. But we think everyone who works to put on WisCon — which specifically includes all our members, who *ARE* the people who make everything from panels to chairing possible — did an amazing job doing our best to keep each other safe.

Thank you all for your hard work, your communication, and your care.