The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 1 February 2022
by Mike Evans
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
– Confucius
Whilst for many the pandemic has brought about changes to their lifestyles which will be difficult to go back to, there are many things which are carrying on as normal as possible. For many the introduction of Homeworking has given them the chance to get out of the morning commute and all the hassles that this exercise brought.
We now see many companies across the world have changed the way they work in order to adapt to these new practises. It is reported that large organisations are looking to downsize their corporate head offices in capital cities across the world due to the lack of work-based staff. However, on the other hand a lot of things have not changed.
Sports across the world have been largely continuing albeit without audiences for some time, but slowly the world has started to return to watching sport as a recreational activity, something that lockdowns during Covid times put a stop to unless you watched it on television.
However, one particular spectacle which is about to start is having to deal with the effects of Covid. The winter Olympics are due to start in Beijing very shortly and whilst the world has been dealing with their issues of Covid, The Chinese Government has been trying to keep a lid on it through some would feel draconian measures for its citizens.
Since early in the Pandemic, China has all but closed its doors to the outside world and has put millions of its citizens under quarantine to eradicate the virus. Whether they have succeeded is anyone’s guess as the reports that come out of China are very much controlled by the state.
91 Nations are represented at the Winter Olympics with 2871 competitors. The International Olympic Committee, organisers in Beijing, and the $2 billion global advertising machine swear that everything is going to be just fine this February: A “filtering” process of travellers into China’s draconian “zero-Covid” environment, followed by daily testing within a “closed loop” and country-specific precautions, will combine to create a triple-bubble of the 24th Winter Olympiad.
But listen to actual Olympians, as magazine Rolling Stone did in real talk with a cross-section of 17 prominent athletes this month, and you begin to comprehend a mutating pressure. After lifetimes preparing for their moment, the Omicron variant is following these young people around the world, straight into a maze of naked capitalism — of germs and depression and greed — that expects blind faith.
As potential cracks in the Chinese crackdown emerge, competitors at the Beijing Games will be expected to grin and bear it for the worldwide TV cameras while dreading that one positive test that could wipe them out from competition… and land them in a “medical prison” run by the state.
More than 175 cases have already surfaced from delegations arriving in China, including at least one snowboarder on Friday, with mounting concern that a wave of athletes could become infected next. Multiple Olympic executives acknowledge to Rolling Stone that on-the-ground organisers and national medical experts have internally discussed the contingency plan of a pause in the action, as the NHL did to take a look in the mirror when Omicron hit the United States in December and the league barred its players from Beijing.
Whilst many Athletes fear that a surge in case could stop the Games the IOC’s adaptive response to the variant with a patchwork of policies, seen through the eyes of the athletes surviving Beijing’s Omicron gauntlet in the spotlight, make it increasingly clear: Whenever the suits who run the Olympics see through the looking glass of our upside-down pandemic world, they determine that the games must go on, at any cost.
As touchdown began in earnest this week, athletes were getting tested en masse at Beijing International. (It’s the PCR throat swab this time.) To avoid needless interaction, they’re carrying their own suitcases. They’ve been shown to their seats on socially distanced buses run by the Chinese organising committee. (Bus and taxi drivers are trapped inside the bubble, too.) And then they’re off through the “processing centre” to wait up to six hours for test results inside the closed loop — a pandemic purgatory of isolation, action sports, and a nebulous nether region reserved for quarantine.
Full vaccination is all but mandated to enter this Olympic thunderdome; unvaxxed athletes and staff were required to complete a three-week quarantine upon arrival in Beijing. IOC officials and national medical officers describe the actual Daily life within the Olympic village as something like this: An athlete wakes up and finds coffee and a collection site for daily testing in the drab lobby of her apartment building in one of three Olympic villages, sub-divided by sport and then by delegation. Many teams have been eating lunch with rubber gloves for months, most of the teams were happy to hear that the dining-hall dividers for each delegation in the 2022 villages are at least see-through.
They might not be so happy to smell the leaning tower of Olympic rubbish, which Beijing organisers will keep stored within the bubble during the Games to “protect the health and safety of the Chinese people,” before mass-processing the garbage in what could amount to a literal dumpster fire.
During the past four days China has detected some 119 cases of COVID-19 among athletes and personnel linked to the Beijing Winter Olympics, with authorities imposing a “closed loop” bubble to keep participants, staff and media separated from the public.
The tally from the weekend showed 37 new cases on Sunday, and 34 on Saturday, with most testing positive after arrival at the airport, Games organisers said.
On Monday, Russian biathlete Valeria Vasnetsova said her own Olympic ambitions were over after testing positive twice following her arrival in Beijing, one of three Russian positive tests announced on Monday.
“Unfortunately, my Olympic dream will remain just a dream,” Vasnetsova wrote on social media. “Maybe one day I will find the strength to rise again but it will be a completely different story.”
Eight athletes or team officials were among 28 people who had tested positive on arrival at the airport on Sunday. International Olympic Committee member Emma Terho, who heads the IOC’s athletes commission, also tested positive and said she has been in isolation since the weekend.
“Even though this is not the start I envisaged, I was happy to see the protocols that Beijing 2022 has put in place are working well,” Terho, a retired Finnish ice hockey player, said on social media.
Whether these games have the same attraction to the sports enthusiast as previous games will not be known until the almost 3000 athletes have done their best to beat not only their competitors but also the virus. Which one wins is another story.
Until the next time stay safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – Total Cases Worldwide – 375,658,447
Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,683,192
Total Recovered Worldwide – 296,770,853
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 73,204,402 (19.4 % of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 302,454,045
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