Tokyo’s Olympic Bubble? Wait Till You See Beijing’s.
By Bradsher & Panja, 8/9/21, New York TImes

Guards in biohazard suits, ready to stop anyone from
leaving. Athletes giving interviews from behind plastic
walls, speaking thru microphones. All-day armpit thermo-
meters, with tiny transmitters to sound the alarm should
someone develop a fever.

With the Winter Olympics in Beijing just 6 months away,
the Chinese authorities are detailing some of the elaborate
precautions they plan to take 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 virus
since bringing it largely under control last year. The
borders are almost completely sealed, & the authoritarian
govt 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 2/3
of the infections reported at the Games.

China plans a stricter approach. For the Winter Games,
to be held from Feb. 4-20, 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 be
required to leave China or endure several weeks of total
isolation in govt-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 & then “re-enter”
the rest of China after a lengthy quarantine. No decision
has been announced on vaccination requirements for partici-
pation 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.

But some details have been made public. Journalists will
interview athletes thru sturdy plastic walls. Microphones
will be equipped with protective sponges, to be changed
after each interview.

Like Tokyo, Beijing plans to severely limit the number of
people allowed to attend the opening & closing ceremonies.
Japan barred foreign spectators, but it let over 42,000
accredited Games participants into the country. Beijing
has already said that fewer than 30,000 people, including
accredited participants, will be allowed to enter China
for the Winter Games, although no decision on foreign
spectators has been announced.

“A simpler and streamlined Olympics will become a must
because of safety concerns,” Zhong Bingshu, a Beijing
municipal official said this year.

No info has been released about Olympic quarantine
facilities. But, in general, China’s top med experts have
concluded that hotels, while comfortable, do not provide
sufficient infection control. So they have invented new
approaches. For example, nearly 2,000 prefab, stackable
metal containers for individual quarantines were built
during an outbreak early this year in Shijiazhuang, about
a 4-hour drive south of Beijing.

The Int'l Olympic Committee has largely shied away from
discussions about Covid protocols at the Beijing Games.
At a news conference in Tokyo on Thurs, the committee’s
spokesman, Mark Adams, suggested that little had been
decided.

“It’s very difficult for me to talk about the Games in
Feb,” he said. “All I can say is we will make every
attempt to make sure that we can find the best conditions
possible for all participants within the framework of
dealing with a continuing pandemic, which I’m afraid will
most certainly be having some quite large effects on us
in Feb next year.”

During the Tokyo Games, officials on various national
Olympic committees traded info as anxiety grew about the
measures China might enforce in Beijing. Most appeared to
believe that the unprecedented restrictions they had seen
in Tokyo would be almost nothing by comparison.

Some athletes urgently need to know what to expect. Those
in sliding sports like luge, skeleton or bobsled, for
example, must familiarize themselves with windy tracks
that they will traverse at dangerous speeds. On the eve
of the Vancouver Games in 2010, a 21-yr-old Georgian luge
hopeful, Nodar Kumaritashvili, was killed when he lost
control of his sled during a trial run, flew off the track
and slammed into a support structure.

Britain plans to send a group of its sliders to Beijing
as early as October. They have been told to expect to
stay there for more than a month in conditions described
as a “severe lockdown.”

The Beijing organizers have provided elaborate videos of
the tracks, shot by drones, for teams unable to come to
China early for training runs. Some expect Chinese athletes
to do better in sliding sports than they otherwise might
have, given the challenges facing their competitors.

Many people in Japan criticized the decision to hold the
Olympics at all, fearing that visitors would bring more
infections. While there has been little public discussion
of the Winter Games so far on China’s censored internet,
the govt is wary of public discontent & has every reason to
try to assure people that the Olympics won’t introduce risks.

China has touted its use of tech to fight the virus. On
Friday, the state-run People’s Daily promoted an invention
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 comfortable
in the sampling process,” the newspaper said on Twitter.

People’s Daily gave no indication that such a robot would
be used at the Olympics, and the Beijing committee didn't
respond to a question about it. But China has test-run a
different technology that will be deployed at the Games:
armpit thermometers that stick like Band-Aids and transmit
the person’s temp.

More than 600 people were outfitted with the devices
during an experiment at a Beijing stadium last spring, &
one did develop a fever that was quickly spotted. “The
venue immediately activated the rescue and epidemic
prevention mechanism and carried out an epidemic review
until a negative result from a nucleic acid test was
confirmed,” the govt said afterward.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/world/asia/beijing-winter-olympics-covid..html