We basically don't do cases in older patients or patients who have potential risk factors for a bad outcome with COVID and we don't do any cases that require an ICU stay because those beds are in short supply. So essentially we're doing healthy people who can go home the same day in terms of orthopedic cases.

We have daily updates from the command center in the hospital about what our bed status is and how close we are to being full [...] So it's a major ongoing concern for us. And if things don't improve, I could see us being closed down again for any elective surgery in the near future.

It would seem to me almost an inevitability that 2020 is going to have a hard time seeing any in person meeting just given the reality of what's happening around the world.

Any barring of an effective vaccine being available and meetings in 2021 probably for the entire year will be very different from all the meetings you've had before. That's clear.

So I would suspect if a meeting occurs, it's going to occur only because there's good local control of the disease [...] And there's good local control and then you have to do all the social distancing and all the mask and all the screen, all the separation, all the handwashing, etc [...] You'll probably have to sign a waiver before you go to meeting, say, hey, I'm taking this risk at my own knowledge and if something bad happens, I can hold me responsible as long as you do the things you're supposed to do to keep me safe.

If you're going to be attending these meetings, you're going to have to start changing the way you think about how you attend meetings in the prior. ‘What we would call inconveniences’, I think, are just going to just be part of routine evaluation.

There's no such thing as zero risk and you have to bounce what you get out of a meeting like that. The importance of person, education and camaraderie and friendship, you know, a much more effective meeting in my opinion is worth the small risk you take. If you're a 70-year-old diabetic with COPD or on steroids, then you don't want to go. If you're a 30-year-old person, even if you get COVID, the numbers would suggest, your risk of mortality is extremely low. And it might be a risk willing to take depending on your situation. So that's where I see this going forward.

Company A doesn't want to have a lab somewhere where 20 surgeons who go there get infected with COVID-19. It would be simply disastrous for them. They are very risk averse.  They don't want to have one of their employees identified as the ground zero person that infects a bunch of people. So they're very cautious about doing [...] For the foreseeable future, in this setting [in-person meetings], as opposed to other things such as product development or introducing new products, I think this is a huge hit to companies that want to do that because a lot of that stuff depends on in-person observation and instruction and that's just very difficult to go forward with right now.

I'm okay with virtual meetings. But for everyone I've talked to, you know, it pales in comparison to the camaraderie and knowledge you get from being somebody in person. And so most of us are eager to get back to that when it's possible to do so safely […] It's only when you have the in person meetings taken away from you, you realize really how important they are. And without trying to put too fine a point on it, it's just much better to be in person with someone, and I think that for a variety of reasons, that would be the norm that we all want to return to at some point in the future.