Macau Casinos Scheduled To Reopen Thursday Following Coronvirus-Forced ShutdownThere Are 10 Confirmed Cases In The Former Portugese Colony As Worldwide Count Surpasses 75,000 |
|
Macau’s casinos were closed for business for two weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak in China, but will reopen for business Thursday, according to ABC News.
Li Weinong, the secretary for economic affairs and finance in Macau said that the temporary government mandate that forced the area’s casinos to close will be lifted on February 20, according to Macau’s public broadcast network.
The government forced a shutdown of casinos for at least two weeks on February 5 as the virus began to spread outside of the Hubei province and throughout the rest of the country.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been 10 confirmed cases of the virus in Macau. At the time of publishing, there are 75,205 confirmed cases worldwide with 74,188 of them being reported in mainland China. There have been 2,014 deaths and 15,084 patients that have successfully recovered.
The reopening of the Macau casinos is music to the ears of two major American gaming companies. In a conference call in early February, Wynn Resorts CEO Matt Maddox said that its Macau property would lose between $2.4 and $2.6 million for every day that the casino is closed. Those numbers come mostly from the payroll of its 12,200 employees.
Las Vegas Sands Corp is the only other American gaming operator in Macau and owns several properties in the area. In its fourth-quarter earnings report, the company said that the outbreak could potentially harm profits in the region.
The poker world has also seen the coronavirus affect its tournaments. In response to the outbreak in Asia, the World Poker Tour announced that it has canceled WPT Vietnam and has postponed WPT Taiwan. The series in Vietnam was scheduled to March 13-22 and the event in Taiwan was originally supposed to take place March 27 – April 6.
The WPT Philippines main event was allowed by the country’s gaming regulators to cut its prize pool guarantee almost in half after the government imposed travel restrictions on foreign nationals.
Copyright © 2001-2024
CardPlayer.com. All rights reserved.
