[With the Omicron variant spreading
only weeks before the Beijing Games, Olympians and organizers are navigating a
stretch run marked by isolation, inoculation and worry.]
By Andrew Keh and Keith Bradsher
A single positive test before the
opening ceremony on Feb. 4, after all, could derail an athlete’s entire career.
An outbreak in China could still derail the entire Games.
“With the new variant being out and
about, it’s definitely a little scary,” said Karen Chen, an American figure
skater. “I know it’s definitely been going around. All we can do is sanitize
our hands, wear a mask and hope for the best.”
China has already announced elaborate
precautions to protect against the coronavirus reaching its own
population or participants in the Winter Games, and to ensure those two groups
have almost no contact with one another. On Thursday, as athletes around the
world continued to plot out the safest personal routes to the Games, China
detailed some of the strictest rules yet for its own citizens.
Spectators at the Winter Olympics —
which were already limited to residents of China — will be allowed to clap, but
not shout, in support of athletes. Waiters, cleaners and other support staff
will not be allowed to leave Olympic venues to visit their families. And any
Olympic participants leaving the vicinity for the rest of China will be
required to spend at least one week in quarantine, followed by at least two
weeks of isolation at home.
And still, Chinese officials
acknowledged they were bracing for the inevitability that some infections will
emerge at the Olympics, where everyone will face daily polymerase chain
reaction (P.C.R.) tests.
“A certain number of positive cases
will become a high probability event,” Han Zirong, the secretary general of
Beijing’s Winter Games organizing committee, told reporters on Thursday.
China has barred overseas
spectators from entering the country. It is allowing vaccinated foreign
athletes, trainers, coaches, referees, journalists and a few others to enter
without enduring the usual two or more weeks of quarantine followed by a week
of home confinement.
The exemption, however, comes with
a stringent requirement that foreigners not leave a “closed
loop” of hotels and sports venues, linked by special buses and trains.
“We must never go outside the
closed loop, let alone reach the city level — this is our bottom line,” said
Huang Chun, deputy director of the Olympic organizing committee’s Office of
Epidemic Prevention and Control.
For those outside China, getting to
the Olympics in the first place remained the most urgent goal.
Many are now taking proactive
measures to keep the virus at bay before their scheduled departures to Beijing.
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, for instance, has begun strongly
encouraging, but not requiring, that its athletes receive booster shots. The
British Olympic Association said it was similarly recommending boosters for its
athletes “where feasible.” Some teams are going further, specifically telling
athletes to try to obtain the Moderna booster after the company announced the
results of early studies that appeared to show it was slightly more
effective against
the Omicron variant. Other studies have suggested those findings are more
hopeful than realistic since the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines remain
largely unavailable in much of the world.
For many athletes and teams,
though, the heartbreak of having years of hard work erased by a positive test
on the eve of the Games seemed almost unimaginable. That fear has led to
changes large and small.
In the Netherlands, the national
speedskating trials — typically a boisterous, multiday affair held in front of
tens of thousands of fans — will take place next week behind closed doors amid
nationwide lockdowns, with only teams and select members of the news media allowed
to enter the rink.
In Austria, a group of American
biathletes training at a high-altitude camp in Ramsau am Dachstein has been
sending a single staff member out for sporadic visits to the grocery store with
a big shopping list containing the athletes’ various requests, as part of an
effort to limit potential exposure.
And Olympic hopefuls attending the
U.S. figure skating championships next month in Nashville — where masks will be
required for fans, but vaccinations will not — are already mapping out plans to
avoid risky situations. Madison Hubbell, an American ice dancer, said major
figure skating competitions were already infamous for spreading colds and flus.
As in previous years, Hubbell will be staying in a rental apartment rather than
the team hotel.
“We have our own accommodations
that are walking distance that don’t require ground transportation,” she said.
“The N95 mask does wonders, and distance does wonders, and we try to take that
same policy that we take into the grocery store here and into the airport.”
China has reported dozens of
coronavirus cases daily this week. On Thursday, the local authorities locked
down Xi’an, a city of 13 million people. At least 242 cases have occurred there
in an outbreak this month. Beijing has not divulged how many involve the
Omicron variant.
The country has been mostly
successful in controlling the virus by quarantining hundreds of close contacts
of infected people, and in some cases contacts of contacts. But similarly broad
measures at the Olympics could make it hard to hold the Games.
Some precautions are already
visible at a ski resort in the mountains near Zhangjiakou, about 100 miles
northwest of Beijing, where nearly half of the Olympic events will be held.
Thick, clear plastic sheeting from floor to ceiling separates bus drivers from
their passengers.
At the resort’s high-speed-rail
station, visitors must provide proof of a negative P.C.R. test in the preceding
48 hours. Also required is proof on a smartphone app that the traveler has not
visited any Chinese city in the previous two weeks that has had a recent
infection.
For construction workers putting
the finishing touches on the venues, the authorities already do nucleic acid
tests once every three days, Jia Maoting, the general manager of the Olympic
Sports Construction and Development Company, told reporters during a visit to
the Olympic ski jump venue.
Han, the secretary general of the
Olympic organizing committee, cautioned that further measures may be added in
the weeks to come. “Everything depends on the changes in the global and Chinese
epidemic situation,” he said, “especially the infectiousness of the new mutant
strain, Omicron.”
For prospective international
attendees, unease about the virus itself has been amplified by uncertainty
about the official protocols should they test positive or be identified as a
close contact of someone who has.
The National Hockey League this
week announced that its players will not participate, a
reversal of the league’s earlier position. And Natalie Geisenberger, an
Olympic luge champion from Germany, drew attention this month after criticizing
the restrictions she experienced during a three-week training trip in China and
suggesting she was reconsidering whether she was even willing to travel there
again for the Games.
Geisenberger, 33, told a German
broadcaster that she was identified as a close contact of someone who had
tested positive and was forced to quarantine for several days in her room,
despite testing negative herself. She said the food provided for her during her
isolation fell short of the standard required for an elite athlete in the midst
of training and competition.
“The conditions that we experienced
there speak in favor of not necessarily going back there again,” said
Geisenberger, who has won four Olympic gold medals in her career.
Others, including Zach Donahue,
Hubbell’s skating partner, seemed resigned to the fact that many things would
be out of their control, and that going to China to chase an Olympic dream in
the middle of a pandemic already meant they were willing to encounter some
potentially uncomfortable situations.
“The decision to continue on to the
Games means we choose to accept anything that happens due to testing or
anything like that,” he said. “We know going into it that it’s high risk. We
know going into a grocery store there’s risk. It’s part of the journey.”
Liu Yi and Li You contributed
research.