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BEIJING – Guards in biohazard suits ready to stop anyone from leaving. Athletes giving interviews from behind plastic walls speak through microphone. All-day underarm thermometers with tiny transmitters that sound the alarm if someone has a fever.
Just six months before the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Chinese authorities are planning elaborate measures against Covid-19. The measures are expected to go far beyond those taken at the Tokyo Games, which ended with more than 400 infections reported on Sunday.
China has made it clear that containing the virus is its top priority. On July 30, Beijing organizers announced plans to redesign 39 Olympic venues as case numbers climbed in Tokyo. Workers are now dividing passageways lengthwise and installing new toilets and other facilities.
The design changes are expected to ensure that athletes have practically no contact with the referees, spectators or journalists, as well as groups that will be kept separate from each other. The aim is to minimize cross infection.
“These additional epidemic prevention measures are not huge in terms of construction scale, nor are they difficult in terms of construction difficulties,” said Liu Yumin, an official from the Beijing Olympics organizing committee. “All venues will be delivered on time.”
Chinese took a zero tolerance approach to the coronavirus since it was largely contained last year. Borders were almost completely sealed, and the authoritarian government suppressed the occasional outbreaks by locking down entire cities and mobilizing large numbers of people to test and monitor infections. Messy Outbreaks of the delta variant In recent days, the authorities are more worried than ever.
In Tokyo, authorities banned nearly all Olympic spectators and told attendees from overseas to stay at designated hotels and board special buses to events. But the practice was haphazard, and news outlets found many violations. Residents of Japan who were allowed to commute from their homes to the Olympic “balloon” represented about two-thirds of the infections reported at the Games.
China is planning a more stringent approach. For the Winter Games, which will be held from February 4-20, authorities plan to isolate China’s 1.4 billion people from essentially all athletes, judges, drivers, guides, journalists and others associated with the event.
According to people familiar with Beijing’s preparations, once the Games are over, everyone involved will have to leave China or be completely isolated for several weeks in government-run quarantine centers and undergo multiple medical tests.
This will include thousands of Chinese personnel who will have to live in the bubble throughout the Games and then “re-enter” the rest of China after a long quarantine. No decisions were made on vaccination requirements for participation in the Games or shorter quarantines for those arriving at the Olympics from overseas.
They insisted on anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the issue in public, familiar with the planning, who said China would see the Games as a success if it unites the nation and strengthens its global image, especially if it does not cause epidemics outside of the bubble. They said that no threats to the health and safety of the country would be tolerated.
The organizers did not disclose the full scope of preventive measures that will develop in the coming months. The Beijing committee responded to emailed questions by promising official announcements.
However, some details have been made public. Journalists will interview athletes through solid plastic walls. The microphones will be equipped with protective sponges that will be replaced after each call.
Like Tokyo, Beijing plans to severely limit the number of people allowed to attend the opening and closing ceremonies. Japan has banned foreign spectators, but has allowed more than 42,000 accredited Game attendees to enter the country. Beijing said fewer than 30,000 people, including accredited participants, would be allowed to enter China for the Winter Games, but no decision was made about foreign spectators.
“Because of safety concerns, a simpler and more modern Olympics will be essential,” Beijing municipal official Zhong Bingshu said this year.
No information has been released about the Olympic quarantine facilities. But overall, China’s leading medical experts concluded that hotels, although comfortable, do not provide adequate infection control. So they invented new approaches. For example, around 2,000 prefabricated, stackable metal containers were built for individual quarantines during an outbreak in Shijiazhuang, south of Beijing, earlier this year.
The International Olympic Committee has largely avoided discussions about Covid protocols at the Beijing Games. At a news conference in Tokyo on Thursday, the committee’s spokesman, Mark Adams, suggested that little decision had been made.
“It is very difficult for me to talk about the Games in February,” he said. “All I can say is that we will make every effort to ensure that we can find the best possible conditions for all participants in dealing with an ongoing pandemic, which I’m afraid will definitely have a huge impact on it. next year in February.”
During the Tokyo Games, officials from various national Olympic committees exchanged information as concerns grew about the measures China could implement in Beijing. Many seemed to believe that the unprecedented restrictions they saw in Tokyo would be almost nothing in comparison.
Some athletes urgently need to know what to expect. Those who do gliding sports, such as tobogganing, sledding or tobogganing, should be familiar with windy tracks that they will traverse at dangerous speeds. On the eve of the 2010 Vancouver Games, the 21-year-old Georgian sled hopeful, Nodar Kumaritasvili was killed When she lost control of her sled during a test run, she flew off the rail and crashed into a support structure.
The UK plans to ship a batch of sliders to Beijing in early October. They were told to expect to stay there for more than a month in what has been described as a “severe quarantine”.
Beijing organizers provided detailed videos of the runways shot by drones for teams that could not arrive early in China for training exercises. Some expect Chinese athletes to perform better in gliding sports than they normally would, given the challenges their competitors are facing.
Many in Japan criticized the decision to hold the Olympics, fearing that visitors would bring more infections. While there has been little public discussion about the Winter Games on China’s censored internet so far, the government is wary of public discontent and has every reason to try to convince people that the Olympics will not pose a risk.
China has launched the use of technology to fight the virus. On Friday, the state-run People’s Daily promoted an invention used in Wuhan, where the virus first appeared: A robot that takes samples for Covid tests and puts a swab on a person’s throat. The newspaper said on Twitter that it made people “feel more comfortable with the sampling process.”
People’s Daily gave no indication that such a robot would be used at the Olympics, and the Beijing committee did not respond to a question about it. But China has tested a different technology to be used in the Games: underarm thermometers that stick like a Band-Aid and transmit a person’s temperature.
During an experiment in a Beijing stadium last spring, more than 600 people were equipped with the devices, and one’s fever was quickly noticed. “The venue immediately activated the rescue and epidemic prevention mechanism and conducted an outbreak investigation until a negative result from a nucleic acid test,” the government said. said then.
Keith Bradsher reported from Beijing and Tarik Panja from Tokyo. joyful contributed to research.
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