In a setback to the resumption of professional sports, the Chinese government issued an order Tuesday delaying the re-start of the Chinese Basketball Association and other group sporting events, according to documents obtained by ESPN.
The CBA’s attempts to return to action after being shut down since January is being seen as a test case for American sports leagues, especially the NBA in the future.
The General Administration of Sport, the body that issued the order, gave no timetable on when it plans to lift the new restriction. The CBA had been making plans to split its 20 teams and send them to two cities and have them play each other in empty arenas within a month, a plan the NBA might consider down the line.
While the spread of the disease has slowed dramatically in China and some aspects of life are headed toward normalcy, sports officials are concerned about asymptomatic carriers, sources said.
The Chinese government announced this week that it soon plans to release official numbers on people who have been found to be asymptomatic, a category that has previously not been broken out in public statistics.
In addition to basketball, the government specifically also shut down the possibility of marathons and encouraged citizens to work out by themselves and in groups connected through the internet.
The CBA planned to house teams in quarantined hotels with multiple temperature checks per day to try to avoid the risk of exposure and spread of the virus. More than a dozen American players, including Jeremy Lin and Lance Stephenson, returned to China within the last two weeks to start a 14-day quarantine with the expectation the season could begin soon.
The teams had begun holding practices as they waited for their foreign teammates to be cleared to join them. It wasn’t immediately clear if these would be allowed to continue.