MWC will go on despite the organizers wanting to pull the plug: report

Mobile World Congress will go on as planned despite concerns of coronavirus, according to a recent report from the Spanish newspaper Nius.

GSMA, the organizers of the event, originally planned a council meeting to discuss the event on Friday but pushed it up to Wednesday. The emergency meeting included 26 telecommunication operators, including Telefonica, Deutsche Bank, AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile and more.

After the meeting, spokeswoman María Jesús Montero announced “The congress organization has announced that it has increased security measures to prevent any type of risk among attendees. We also have one of the best public health systems.”

Another report from the Wired indicates that GSMA was pleading with the Barcelona government to cancel the event. While GSMA wants to initiate the cancellation itself, the London-based company would not be able to claim back the insurance if the Catalonian authorities do not block the event. The only way to do that is if the Barcelona government declared a public health emergency.

However, according to Nius, the Barcelonian government is insisting that everything is under control.

There are now a vast number of companies that are not taking part in the conference. These include Facebook, Amazon, LG, Intel, Ericsson, Vivo, Nvidia, Cisco, Sony, HMD Global, Nokia, Sprint, Volvo, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, McAfee, and BT.

ZTE and TCL have cancelled their press conference but will still attend the conference.

Motorola, Samsung, Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi still plan to attend the event.

Huawei and Oppo said that its executives, presenters and service staff that are attending the conference would be quarantined outside of China for 14 days before the event.

The GSMA has announced it will have measurements in place like temperature screening, increased cleaning and disinfection, increased on-site medical support and more.

Source: Nius (translated from Spanish with Google), Wired