On Wednesday, for the second time this week, Austin city officials responded to calls for the cancellation of next week’s South By Southwest conference and festivals because of the spreading coronavirus.

The show will go on, they said.

“Right now, there is no evidence that closing SXSW, or any other gathering, would make the community safer,” Austin Public Health interim chief Dr. Mark Escott said at a briefing this week.

This is a mistake. SXSW should be canceled. Not just because it endangers Austin, but because it could be an event that spreads coronavirus across the United States, and into other countries where it is not now prevalent.

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SXSW — which is actually a series of festivals and a technology conference starting March 13 — draws hundreds of thousands of people each year from across the globe. More than 417,000 attended in 2019, with more than a quarter of them traveling from 105 other nations.

While Austin leaders note that travel restrictions should ensure that no one will be attending from China or Iran — the two biggest international hot zones for the virus — there is no assurance regarding people who have come into contact with travelers from those countries, or who have recently been there themselves.

In addition, last year 17 percent of attendees were from the West Coast, where California and Washington state, both tech and entertainment industry centers, have seen clusters of COVID-19 cases, the respiratory illness caused by the virus. The governors of California and Washington, as well as Florida, have declared states of emergency.

These hundreds of thousands of people descend on Austin for 10 days. They pour into bars, conference rooms, music venues, theaters and other facilities. There are lines around city blocks to get into the hottest parties and performance, where patrons stand shoulder to shoulder. It is the perfect scenario for catching something — in fact, a post-SXSW head cold is so common among attendees that it has been dubbed the “nerd flu”.

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So picture this: Let’s say that two or three people who have been exposed to the coronavirus are in attendance. They may be asymptomatic for now, or they may have only a mild case that looks like a cold. They shake hands, touch doorknobs and elevators, cough in the middle of an SRO crowd in a Sixth Street bar. An untold number of people come into contact with one of the infected individuals, or something they have touched, over the course of the week.

Then, when it’s over, they go back home where, so far, no cases of COVID-19 have been reported. For two weeks - the incubation period for the virus - it stays that way.

And then, in late March and early April, the number of people who test positive for the virus begins to jump, in places where it has not appeared before. Do the leaders in the city of Austin and SXSW’s promoters really want to be responsible for that scenario?

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While Austin officials may be in denial about this, others are not. The list of major companies that hveave pulled out of the event is a who’s who of tech: Facebook, Twitter, Intel, Mashable, TikTok, Amazon Studios, Netflix and, most recently, Apple.

Concern about the virus has caused the cancellation of other big gatherings, starting with Mobile World Congress smartphone show in Barcelona in February. Since then, Facebook and Google have canceled their developers conferences. The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was also canceled. Microsoft canceled its MVP event in its hometown of Seattle.

And in Houston, just days before it was to begin, IHS Markit canceled its CERAWeek event, which draws some top executives and thinkers in the energy industry. Organizers of the Offshore Techhology Conference, which draws about 60,000 people to Houston, say the conference will go on — but it’s still two months away.

All these events pale in size compared to SXSW.

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There’s another event happening in Texas that draws huge crowds — the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. It is underway now, but I don’t believe it poses the same risks for spreading the virus as SXSW. It doesn’t draw the same international crowd as SXSW. It also doesn’t pack people into very small spaces in the same way.

I certainly understand Austin’s hesitation to cancel the event, which It starts March 13. A lot of money has been spent by people planning to attend. SXSW is a huge boost to Austin’s economy, and all kinds of hard-working people rely on the cash it brings in. (Dan Solomon lays out the grass roots implications of canceling SXSW in a Texas Monthly article.) In 2018, SXSW generated $318 million in taxes for the city of Austin.

That this is a difficult decision was reinforced by Dr. Peter Hotez, one of the world’s leading experts on transmissable diseases and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. In an interview with the Chronicle’s Lisa Gray, he said he was recently asked by an Austin reporter if SXSW should be canceled.

“It’s hard to say,” Hotez said.

Let me say that I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself a coronavirus alarmist. Last weekend I attended a crowded Los Lobos concert at Houston’s House of Blues and didn’t give the virus a second thought . . . that is, until a restroom attendant thrust a giant jug of pink liquid hand soap at me as I approached the sink.

But having been to many, many tech conferences — and to SXSW once — and knowing what they are like, I know a potential train wreck when I see it. It’s one that can be avoided.

Update 3.6.2020: Houston Ion tech hub and Austin's Capital Factory - which owns the Station Houston accelerator - on Thursday bailed from SXSW.

dwight.silverman@chron.com

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