Will You Go To A Con In The First Half of 2021? Don’t Bet On It.
Tuesday ReedPop announced that two of its conventions, Emerald City Comic Con and C2E2, had new dates for 2021. Both of them have been rescheduled for December of next year, from tentative dates in the Spring. Wednesday KatsuCon announced that it was cancelling the 2021 convention altogether — a surprise to no one, since the convention was to be held on Valentine’s Day weekend in mid-February, just three months away.
Not to be outdone, Fan Expo, which owns a handful of conventions around North America, has quietly moved almost all of them into the six weeks from the beginning of August to the middle of September. Starting with Calgary Expo on July 30 through Aug. 2 and ending with Fan Expo Dallas on Sept. 17-19, the only outlier is MegaCon Orlando, which is still officially set for March 18-21, 2021. Although, if I were a betting man, I would say MegaCon will try to move into the six-week time frame sooner rather than later.
What all this tells us is that nobody in charge of the big conventions in North America thinks any venue will be allowed to let thousands of nerdy fans congregate until the third quarter of 2021 at the earliest. And just to be sure, FanExpo is scheduling cons for the later half of Q3 while ReedPop has jumped to the end of Q4 altogether.
Frankly, there was never a chance that conventions would come back in the first six months of 2021, once the pandemic got into full swing. Despite what the Trump administration had previously stated about a covid-19 vaccine being approved before the Nov. 3 election, nobody who listened to the actual companies working on vaccines believed it. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that was recently announced to have shown 90% effectiveness in clinical trials still needs to go through those trials to the end, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in an interview with NPR that the earliest he can imagine approval by the FDA in the U.S. is the very end of this year, and more likely Q1 of 2021. Even if, as Bourla claims, Pfizer will have 1.3 billion doses ready globally by the end of 2021, those first doses in early 2021 (should the vaccine get approved) would go to first responders and front-line health workers. It’s likely that the average population would not start getting the vaccine (planned to be free, Bourla said) until Q2 at the earliest and Q3 more likely.
Then there is the likelihood that the incoming Biden administration will try to establish a 4-6 week nationwide lockdown to get the virus spread under control. While a month-long national lockdown during which people can get vaccinated for free would probably put the coronavirus to bed, it would also eliminate that possibility of any large events happening during that lockdown, and likely for some weeks after, to ensure effective squashing of virus transmission. And with covid-19 cases spiking into numbers and transmission rates not seen even during the worst weeks of May and June — I’m looking at you, Texas, with your now 1 million covid-19 cases — a lockdown and vaccine program is needed more than ever. So, no cons in Q1 or Q2 of 2021, if not even later in the year.
I’ve been saying that there won’t be any cons in the first half of 2021 for months now, as have many others. Now we have the behavior of multi-million dollar convention corporations saying, in effect, they agree. Until we can meet again at a convention, stay safe people. Wear those masks, wash those hands and avoid those crowds.
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