BeavRG-XVIII

On Wednesday, 3/11//2020 the Oregon and Southwest Washington Mensa Executive Committee (ExComm) met to discuss cancelling BeaveRG-XVIII in light of the novel coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes known as COVID-19.

I don’t have to tell you that SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). And that Presidents, Governors and just about everyone else is making proclamations.

After 2 hours and 20 minutes of deliberations the vote was 3/2 to cancel the event.
BeavRG-XVIII is no more.  

Would the efforts of Western Medicine reduce COVID-19 to an annoyance not much worse than a bad flu season by late May?

Would this be a really bad bug, the likes of which we’ve not seen for 102 years?
Nobody really knows.  Predicting the future is like that.However in the week since that meeting and vote, news has gotten a a whole lot more intense.

We were entering a time of high effort RG preparation and planning for our volunteer team and our future guests. Pulling the plug at that moment was the right thing to do.

BeavRG-XVIII is no more. We will retire that number as a way to remind ourselves of this point in history. COVID-19 has impacted us al and should never be forgotten.
Our next RG will be named BeaveRG-XIX.

We won’t start to work on -XIX until the COVID-19 pandemic settles down.Then we will make a lot of noise! A ton of energy has gone into -XVIII and we want it to go somewhere.  We will keep the elists open.

We shall be issuing full refunds to all 75 guests who have registered for -XVIII including refunding e-ticket fees.  The timing of that will be announced soon.  Give us a week or three.