Today, Mark Lien at the IES held an excellent webinar about transformation in the lighting industry and of course covered the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. He asked me and several others to contribute our thoughts on long-term impacts of the pandemic on our industry. Here are my thoughts.

The LIGHTFAIR conference and trade show recently postponed and then canceled its 2020 event in Las Vegas due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference organizers appear to be preparing to take the 2020 event online as a digital conference. This would be a welcome development.

In this guest post, Mick Ventola, the founder and managing director of Ventola Projects, shares his experiences of the COVID crisis and its impact on business operations – and how best we might prepare for when life gets back to some semblance of normality.

Gigahertz-Optik’s X1-1-UV-3726 radiometer enables the effectiveness of UV germicidal irradiation (UVGI) to be accurately determined for both low pressure mercury (254nm) germicidal lamps and UV-C LEDs. Additionally, the device has sufficient sensitivity to detect if undesired exposure poses a photobiological safety risk to users.

Supporting the global action to reduce the transmission of COVID-19, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) recently released two key publications on ultraviolet radiation disinfection, now available free.

The May 3-7, 2020 LIGHTFAIR trade show and conference, previously announced as postponed, is now canceled, as announced today by the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and International Market Centers (IMC).

Ecosense recently announced it has acquired assets from Soraa. Under the terms of the deal, Ecosense acquires the Soraa name, intellectual property and lamps, including the company’s signature VIVID, BRILLIANT HL and HEALTHY product lines. This move is the first foray into the professional lamp category for Ecosense.

Starting early in the year, WAC Lighting ordered 500,000 Level-3 Surgical Masks with the intent of donating them to COVID-19 healthcare relief efforts abroad. As conditions dramatically worsened in the U.S., WAC is now shipping these 500,000 surgical masks to U.S. hospitals, primarily in the New York metropolitan area, where healthcare workers are being overrun by caseloads and are in desperate need of supplies.

The Global Lighting Association (GLA) recently issued a press releases urging authorities to ensure sustained access to lighting products during these challenging times by categorizing lighting as an essential product and ensuring lighting products can continue to be manufactured, supplied and sold.