Facebook is canceling all big events for another year. Here’s what Zuckerberg said

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the social media company will not be holding “any large physical events” until June 2021, in an effort to encourage social distancing among its employees.

“I hope this helps contain the spread of Covid-19 so we can keep our communities safe and get back up and running again soon,” he said in a Facebook post.

The company is taking a number of other measures as well, the post went on to say, including extending a halt on business-related travel until June 2020.

“The summary is: we’re slowing our plans to return to the office in order to prioritize helping the rest of our community and local economy to get back up and running first,” the post said.

Zuckerberg said COVID-19 precautions will remain in place, even once it’s deemed safe for employees to come back to the office.

“We’ve also let our employees know that even after more of our teams can return, if there’s any reason they feel they can’t work in our offices — because they are in a vulnerable population, because with schools and camps canceled they don’t have childcare, or anything else — that they can plan to work from home through at least the summer.”

Certain employees, seen as critical or those who can’t do their jobs from home, “may be able to return sooner,” the post said, such as “content reviewers working on counter-terrorism or suicide and self-harm prevention, and engineers working on complex hardware.”

The move is in line with what some experts have suggested the nation do to ride out the novel coronavirus and limit the loss of life.

According to a team of Harvard University researchers, intermittent social distancing may be necessary until 2022, unless a vaccine is found and mass-produced, and the U.S. healthcare infrastructure is significantly expanded, they wrote in a study published by Science Magazine.

“Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022,” the study said, adding that “surveillance should be maintained ... as late as 2024.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 3:38 PM.