Yet another popular shipping conference has fallen victim to the coronavirus pandemic, with the Association of Ship Brokers and Agents (ASBA) scrapping plans for its gathering in Miami Beach on 30 September.

ASBA's administrators confirmed the cancellation to TradeWinds Thursday, saying that the group will stage a one-hour webinar instead.

ASBA intends to return to Miami Beach on 29 September 2001 for the three-day event, which traditionally has drawn a large attendance from Latin America.

Certainly not helping ASBA's hopes to go ahead this year had been the development of Florida as one of the nation's hotspots for virus outbreaks.

Miami-Dade County has reported a 50% increase in hospital admissions over the past two weeks, and people arriving from Florida to the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have been required to spent 14 days in quarantine.

ASBA joins a long list of shipping events to cancel or postpone 2020 sessions.

Posidonia, the high-profile, week-long shipping event in Greece, has been moved from the first week of June until late October. Connecticut Maritime Association's annual event in the US has been rescheduled twice, and now hopes to go ahead in October.

A gathering of top maritime executives at the Global Maritime Forum (GMS) has been postponed until 2021.

Marine Money's annual week of ship finance conferences in New York in June has been cancelled for this year.

SMM in Hamburg, one of the world's largest ship technology exhibitions and conferences, has also been postponed until February 2021 due to the pandemic.