After skipping 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor and T3 Enterprise conferences scheduled to be held back-to-back Monday, Sept. 27, through Friday, Oct. 1, in Denton, Texas, this year will now have to wait until 2022 due to the delta variant.
Organizers decided this week to postpone the conferences after several participants expressed concerns about taking part due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases, Joel Bruckenstein, T3 president and producer of the conference, told ThinkAdvisor on Friday.
"It's all related to delta," he said, noting the conferences will instead be held in the spring at the same location. Specific dates have not been selected yet.
"Up until last week, we were not getting really any pushback from exhibitors or advisors," Bruckenstein said in a phone interview. However, there were many published articles over the weekend explaining "how you can be asymptomatic and basically have it in your nasal passage even if you were fully vaccinated and then carry it home," he noted.
As a result, since last Friday (Aug. 13), "we were hearing from both the exhibitor side and the advisor side, [with] people raising concerns" that only increased on Monday and Tuesday, according to Bruckenstein. Those concerns included at least some of them having small kids and other people at home who couldn't be vaccinated and they didn't want to bring the virus home to them, he said.
"That's a major concern," he said, adding: "We also heard from a few companies … that they were reinstituting travel bans companywide."
As a result, "it just seemed like the tide was turning and if we were going to pull the plug on this and reschedule it, it was better to do it sooner rather than later," he explained, pointing out he didn't want to "wait until the last minute and leave people hanging."
