The organizer of the Chinaplas 2022 trade show announced March 18 that it's postponing this year's fair to an unscheduled new date, citing tightening measures in China to control the coronavirus.
The show had been slated for April 25-28 in Shanghai but the event organizer, Hong Kong-based Adsale Exhibition Services Ltd., said it was postponing the fair "in view of the latest COVID development and the further tightening of the pandemic control measures in Shanghai and other provinces of China."
"New dates and other details of the exhibition will be announced soon," Adsale said.
The show, which is the largest annual trade fair in the plastics industry, draws more than 150,000 people and several thousand exhibiting companies each year.
The 2021 edition was held in Shenzhen in southern China and was the industry's first major trade show to take place in the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, the 2020 edition of Chinaplas had also been initially postponed and then canceled outright.
Shanghai and other Chinese cities have been placed in near lockdown conditions in recent days, as authorities try to maintain a "zero COVID" strategy for controlling the virus. Factories and businesses have closed and some schoolchildren have reverted to online classes.
In Shanghai and other cities, media are reporting neighborhood lockdowns and required mass testing.
China's COVID-19 strategy has relied much more heavily on periodic stringent lockdowns and control measures than some other countries.
It's resulted in fewer deaths as a percentage of the population but has left authorities worried about handling the more transmissible Omicron variant, according to an op-ed from the head of the Yale Institute for Global Health in the Los Angeles Times.
The Chinese territory of Hong Kong has reported more than 5,000 COVID-19 deaths in this latest wave, which officials blame on low vaccination rates among the elderly, a lack of natural immunity from prior infections and an overwhelmed health care system.
