EAA Cancels Air Academy - AVweb

I emailed the folks I always stay with at Oshkosh yesterday apologizing and telling them I had decided not to come this year even if Airventure is not canceled. Unless there is a miracle vaccine (unlikely) by July, I could not risk getting sick so far from home (particularly since I am in an age group that has a high mortality rate) and I wanted to give them plenty of time to find someone to replace the income they would lose from me. They emailed back to say I they were just about to let everyone who had planned to stay with them know that they could not have people in their home in the present situation and were not going to be hosting Airventure attendees this year. Even if Airventure is not canceled, I suspect it will be a very different experience. Perhaps my view of the situation is colored by having a wife who is a surgeon at a major medical center which now has over half its beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. She cannot operate on non-emergency patients because the hospital is turning ORs into intensive care rooms to take advantage of the ventilators in them. This crisis in not like swine flu, H1N1 or any other medical crisis I have experienced in the 30 years married to a medical professional. I am very sad about missing Oshkosh this year, but for me, it is much too scary a time to think about mingling with tens/hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world in close quarters.