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 | | Daily reported coronavirus cases in the United States, seven-day average.The New York Times |
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China has created an elaborate Olympic "bubble" to keep the athletes, attendees and staff protected, and to prevent the virus from spreading throughout the country. Officials said they had already detected more than 300 Covid-19 cases in people seeking to enter or remain in the bubble. |
For a glimpse inside, I spoke to my colleague Andrew Keh, a sports reporter. |
What was it like preparing to go to Beijing? |
The Olympic Committee also created partnerships with a number of different airlines to set up Olympic-only flights, which were the only way to get in the country. They didn't have any that came out of North or South America, so we flew to Paris on a commercial flight and then we picked up a special Olympic flight out of Paris, which was just for journalists and athletes. |
What was it like entering the Olympic bubble? |
So I got off the plane and was met by a horde of Olympic medical staffers wearing head-to-toe hazmat suits. And I got what was, for me, one of the most excruciatingly painful nasal swabs I've had during the entire pandemic. And then I got my bag and was shuttled on to one of these special private Olympic buses, which are part of this private network of transportation that they've created for these Games. And we drove in a special Olympic highway lane to our hotel, in the heart of Beijing. |
In general, everything is super restricted and very locked down. It was a little bit deflating, for instance, to pull up to the hotel in the bus and see like a 10-foot-tall fence around the perimeter of it and guards standing everywhere. |
How are these Games different from Tokyo last year? |
In Japan, even though a lot of the protocols on paper sounded the same, it was very different. We had the freedom to walk outside of our hotels and were moving between the venues and could go to convenience stores, things like that. None of that's on the table here. |
Something else that sticks out is just the sheer number of tests that they're doing. In Tokyo, we were testing every four days, and here, they are testing every single person, every single day. The last number I saw was close to 70,000 people tested every day. That's like giving the entire population of Santa Fe, N.M., a swab every single day. Just the sheer logistical challenge of doing that is stunning. |
What are the similarities you've noticed with other Games? |
Robots are like, weirdly, always a thing at recent Olympics. I think it's a way for the country to sort of show off whatever new technology that country is producing. In Japan, there was a 3-point-shooting robot at the basketball games. But here there have been robots rolling around, cleaning, or purifying the air. We've also seen robots deployed in the media cafeteria — they're making a lot of the food. I think they might have something to do with minimizing human contact. So I had dumplings made by a robot the other day, and fried rice served to me by another. I've tasted a lot of the robot food, and I think humans make food taste better. |
In terms of virus safety, how does it feel at the Games? |
Just the sheer amount of rules and testing that are being placed on us I guess gives us a level of comfort that most likely you're not going to get sick. In a weird way, this is probably one of the safest places you can be at this point, but at considerable expense and sacrifice. |
As far as we've been told, the entire Olympic work force is bubbling with us. And we've seen reports that these local workers are going to have to quarantine on the way out, too. There's going to be some people here who will be separated from their families for, like, two months. |
So in a way, you're seeing "zero Covid" in action. How does it feel? |
Let me tell you a story from here that I think is relates to your question. There was a Belgian Olympian who had a positive test upon arriving here. So she was placed in an isolation facility and was kind of confused about what was going on. Then she had medical staff pull her out of that facility, and she thought she was going back to the athletes' village. But it turned out she was going to another isolation facility. She was very confused. She posted a video on her social media in tears. You can just tell she was just utterly disoriented, confused about what was going on and basically seemed on the verge of breaking. |
We've been talking about all the personal sacrifice and the mental health stakes that's gone into doing this. And then to sort of see, in a very vivid way, what it can do to an individual person was a very tactile representation of what this is doing to people. Seeing someone pour their heart out that way felt like seeing one side of this whole policy in action. |
After weeks of a coronavirus surge fueled by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, Indian health officials said that the number of cases appeared to be declining, even as daily numbers remained high in some parts of the country. |
"We are seeing the pandemic situation has improved," Dr. V.K. Paul, who heads India's Covid task force, said at a news conference on Thursday. "There are states and districts of concern, but overall, there is a contraction in the spread of infection, which is heartening." |
 | | Daily new cases in India, seven-day average.The New York Times |
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Yesterday the country reported 172,433 cases, down from more than 340,000 daily cases a few weeks earlier, the health ministry said. And the percentage of positive test results in the country had fallen by 50 percent, according to government data. |
Even amid the good news, India's official total Covid death count surpassed 500,000 on Friday. Experts have said that the actual toll is most likely far higher than what is officially reported, in part because deaths are often underreported. |
What else we're following |
My father died from Covid in December 2021 after receiving both his vaccine doses and his booster. It doesn't matter that he had other health conditions — he did everything we knew how to do to stay safe. In the U.S., it feels like the social contract is void. We should have been able to protect people like my dad. He should still be here. If we lived in any other developed country, he probably would be. My dad and everyone like him are the price paid for this American idea of personal freedom without regard for the protection of the most vulnerable. — Amber Richardson, Berkeley, Calif. |
Let us know how you're dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter. |
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