D – 11 before the opening of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games. Eleven days, or less than 300 hours. But the Olympic event is still not about sport. Not yet. The health crisis continues to dominate the news, questions and discussions.
On Sunday January 23, Chinese organizers revealed that they had recorded 72 cases of COVID-19, on the evening of Saturday January 22, among the 2.586 accredited arrivals in China since January 4. The countdown is now on. It will be updated daily, at least until the end of the Paralympic Games.
Reassuring news: none of the cases recorded since the health bubble came into operation concern athletes or delegation officials. There were 171 of them who set foot on Chinese soil from abroad during the same period.
In detail, the distribution of COVID-19 cases among the Olympic family displays a certain balance: 39 of them were discovered during tests carried out at Beijing International Airport, the only authorized entry point for accredited people. foreigners; the other 33 cases were recorded inside the bubble.
Still according to the organizers, 336.421 PCR tests were carried out among those accredited between January 4 and 22. Unlike the Tokyo Games, all foreign visitors (athletes and management, officials, media, etc.) are subject to daily screening tests during their stay in Beijing.
Comment from Brian McCloskey, head of the Beijing 2022 medical expert group: “ We have never set a target of zero cases, even in the closed-loop system put in place for the Games. The first test results are consistent, in line with what we experienced last summer at the Tokyo Games"
At the same time, the IOC and the organizing committee announced that they had slightly revised downwards the sensitivity slider for PCR tests carried out on foreign participants. A report from Radio Canada broadcast last week had sowed doubt as to the relevance of certain positive results. He suggested that Chinese-style tests went so far as to detect debris of dead virus, putting recently infected visitors at risk of being falsely detected positive.
The positivity threshold has been lowered from 40 to 35 to enter the athletes' village. Furthermore, positive cases will be declared out of danger after three negative tests recorded for three consecutive days.
Still on the health front, the Beijing authorities launched a mass screening operation on Sunday January 23 in the Fengtai district, where nearly 2 million people live. The reason: the discovery among the population of 25 cases of COVID-19. As soon as this measure was announced, residents of the district lined up on the sidewalks in front of the screening centers, despite snow-covered ground and temperatures below zero degrees.
The Chinese capital must “ take the most resolute, decisive and strict measures to block the chain of transmission of the epidemic“said a municipality spokesperson, Xu Hejian, at a press conference.
The day before, Chinese organizers took possession of the Olympic stadium, the Bird's Nest in Beijing, for a second rehearsal of the opening ceremony. According to the channel CCTV system, it mobilized 4.000 participants (there were 15.000 artists and extras for the opening of the Beijing 2008 Games), the youngest of whom was only 5 years old.
No details of the show have been leaked. But the agency Xinhua announces that the opening ceremony has been shortened to fit in just 100 minutes. The reason is the very wintery temperatures (it was -5° on Saturday evening during the rehearsal). And, again and again, the health crisis.
