Will PAX East suffer the same fate as MWC amid rising coronavirus concerns?

PAX East, one of the major annual gaming events, is scheduled from February 27 to March 1, 2020, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Massachusetts, United States. However, with the ongoing concerns around the widespread of novel coronavirus, Covid-19, the cloud of uncertainty now overshadows the annual event.

The first shocker for the PAX East comes with Sony deciding not to attend the gaming convention next week. Sony was expected to bring its highly-anticipated game, The Last of Us Part II, to the PAX East along with other games like the Dreams, Marvel's Iron Man VR, Nioh 2, Doom Eternal, and Spelunky 2.

However, despite teasing a prominent presence at the upcoming show, Sony has decided to cancel its appearance at the PAX East due to the Coronavirus outbreak. The virus started out from Wuhan, China and quickly spread throughout the globe becoming a world health crisis. At the moment the Coronavirus or the COVID-19 has claimed 2,130 deaths worldwide and a total of 75,751 confirmed cases of the disease.

PAX East 2020 hangs in uncertainty

With a major player like Sony opting out of the convention, things could easily go wrong for PAX East 2020. There's a chance that the whole event could be called off-- something that had happened with the 2020 edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) a while ago. When major companies like Amazon, Nvidia, LG, Samsung, Ericsson, and ZTE announced not to participate in the MWC, the host GSMA cancelled the event altogether.

PAX East understands the concern and issued a notification on February 19 that the convention will take place as scheduled with enhanced cleaning and sanitization across the show-- "including adhering to the recommendations set forth in the US EPA's Emerging Pathogen Policy regarding cleaning disinfectants effective against the COVID-19 virus".

However, the comment from PAX does not sound reassuring to the fullest. During the time of MWC, Sony had also announced not to participate in the trade show and other companies followed suit. The same could happen again and if any more of the major players decide a no-show at the PAX East 2020, the convention will have no option but to suffer the same fate as the MWC 2020.