Yeah, its either that or the situation with the coronavirus in China right now.
To be fair, so far there are ~75000 to 80000 cases of Coronavirus in a county of 1.3 Billion people. As such, the probability that this happened now (let alone several days ago) to someone in his close family (10 members) is 0.06%.For those wondering what happened, I suspect his family may have been affected with the COVID-19 virus in china. The last post stated they were travelling for Chinese new year festivals. Hopefully, his family is ok though that's far more important than this project at this time.
I think we can safely say this is not the case.