Tokyo’s Olympic Bubble? Wait Till You See Beijing’s.BEIJING — Guards in biohazard suits, ready to stop anyone from leaving. Athletes giving interviews from behind plastic walls, speaking through microphones. All-day armpit thermometers, with tiny transmitters to sound the alarm should someone develop a fever.
With the Winter Olympics in Beijing just six months away, the Chinese authorities are planning elaborate precautions against Covid-19. The measures are expected to go far beyond those taken at the Tokyo Games, which ended Sunday with more than 400 infections reported.
China has made clear that containing the virus is its top priority. On July 30, as case numbers were climbing in Tokyo, Beijing organizers announced plans to redesign their 39 Olympic venues. Workers are now dividing passageways lengthwise and installing new toilets and other facilities.
The design changes are supposed to ensure that athletes have practically no contact with referees, spectators or journalists, groups that will also be kept separate from one another as well. The goal is to minimize cross-infection.
“These supplementary epidemic prevention measures are not very large in terms of construction scale, not difficult in terms of construction difficulties,” said Liu Yumin, an official with the Beijing Olympics’ organizing committee. “All venues will be delivered on time.”
China has taken a zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus since bringing it largely under control last year. The borders are almost completely sealed, and the authoritarian government has quashed sporadic outbreaks by locking down entire cities and mobilizing large numbers of people to test and trace infections. Scattered outbreaks of the Delta variant in recent days have officials even more concerned than usual.
In Tokyo, the authorities barred almost all Olympic spectators and told participants from overseas to stay in designated hotels and ride special buses to events. But enforcement was haphazard, and news outlets found many violations. Residents of Japan, who were allowed to commute from home to the Olympic “bubble,” represented about two-thirds of the infections reported at the Games.
China plans a stricter approach. For the Winter Games, to be held from Feb. 4 to 20, the authorities intend to wall off China’s 1.4 billion people from essentially all athletes, judges, drivers, guides, journalists and others associated with the event.
When the Games end, practically everyone involved will berequired to leave China or endure several weeks of total isolation in government-run quarantine centers, undergoing numerous medical tests, according to people familiar with Beijing’s preparations.
That will include thousands of Chinese staff, who will have to live in the bubble throughout the Games and then “re-enter” the rest of China after a lengthy quarantine. No decision has been announced on vaccination requirements for participation in the Games, or on the shorter quarantines for people arriving for the Olympics from overseas.
China will consider the Games a success if they unify the nation and strengthen its global image without causing outbreaks, especially outside the bubble, said the people familiar with the planning, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. They said no threat of any sort to the nation’s health and safety would be tolerated.
Organizers have not revealed the full extent of the preventive measures, which will evolve in the coming months. The Beijing committee responded to emailed questions by promising official announcements.
No information has been released about Olympic quarantine facilities. But, in general, China’s top medical experts have concluded that hotels, while comfortable, do not provide sufficient infection control.So they have invented new approaches. For example, nearly 2,000 prefabricated, stackable metal containers for individual quarantineswere built during an outbreak early this year in Shijiazhuang, about a four-hour drive south of Beijing.
China has touted its use of technology to fight the virus. On Friday, the state-run People’s Daily promoted aninvention being used in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged: a robot that takes samples for Covid tests, putting a swab down a person’s throat. It makes people “feel more comfortablein the sampling process,” the newspaper said on Twitter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/world/asia/beijing-winter-olympics-covid.html