Coronavirus: Beijing Cancels All Large-Scale Events in August

Beijing’s government has canceled all large-scale events and exhibitions in the city for the rest of August in an effort to contain the city’s latest outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus, the state-run China Daily reported Thursday.

“The Chinese capital Beijing has decided to cancel large-scale exhibitions and events scheduled this month, after three locally-transmitted COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases were newly confirmed in the first 12 hours of Wednesday,” China Daily relayed, citing an earlier report by Xinhua on August 4.

China Daily is a newspaper owned by the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party, while Xinhua is the official state-run press agency of China.

Beijing’s ban on large-scale events in August means the third annual World 5G Conference, scheduled to take place in the Chinese capital from August 6-8, is now canceled. The event, described by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday as a summit for leaders of the “mobile internet industry,” would have been held in a “215,000-square-foot exhibition center in southern Beijing.”

“China’s three major state-run telecom operators, as well as Qualcomm and Nokia, were expected to participate,” according to the newspaper.

The same venue booked to host the now-scrapped World 5G Conference in Beijing over the weekend “is scheduled to host the World Robot Conference later this month,” the Journal noted on August 5. “Organizers of that, which attracted 300,000 visitors in 2019 before Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus], said Thursday that they were awaiting orders from the Beijing government and expected to be told to postpone.”

Communist Party officials in Beijing ordered local airport and traffic authorities on Wednesday to “strengthen their prevention and control measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus,” according to Xinhua. Per new anti-virus measures ordered by Beijing’s municipal government, “public places such as parks, scenic spots, performance venues, cinemas and libraries should strictly limit the number of visitors and implement staggered shifts and reservation systems.”

Beijing’s latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus is linked to a nationwide outbreak of the disease that Chinese health officials have traced to a single cluster infection at the Nanjing Lukou International Airport in eastern Jiangsu province on July 20.

China reported 124 new Chinese coronavirus infections on August 5, the highest number of new daily cases from the nationwide outbreak since it began. China on August 4 recorded its highest number of total coronavirus infections since late January, reporting “485 locally transmitted cases with symptoms between July 20 and August 3,” according to Reuters.