30,000 visitors from 143 countries will visit Barcelona for the three-day Mobile World Congress (MWC), which begins on Monday – and each will have to pass through a COVID-19 test area with 80 booths.

The event received lukewarm participation from some major technology companies, including Telefonica, Orange, Huawei, Lenovo, Vodafone, but Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung are skipping the event altogether.

The industry hopes that this year’s event, which is divided between physical, virtual and hybrid activities, will provide a blueprint for future business and corporate events.

At a pre-event reception on Sunday at the La Boqueria market in Barcelona, MWC guests and stakeholders networked with much excitement and greeted each other with elbows or fists after a year of isolation, closures and video conferencing.

The scale of the test operation is enormous.

On Saturday alone, 10,000 people were tested at the huge Fira venue, where MWC is being held, as preparations were made for the event.

For more information read the original story in Reuters.