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China promised a “simple, safe, and splendid” Beijing Olympics. While the elaborate, anti-COVID measures at the 2022 Winter Games were far from simple, organizers managed to put on a show, even amid the constrained circumstances of a global health crisis. There’s also no doubt that the event was safe.
COVID-19 has been surging around the world, fueled by the more contagious Omicron variant. On Dec. 27, just over a month before the Winter Games began, global daily COVID-19 cases hit a record 1.44 million.
Despite these daunting circumstances, Olympics organizers had recorded only 437 infections at the Games by the time the flame was extinguished at Beijing National Stadium on Feb. 20. Though more than 180 athletes and team officials tested positive after arriving in China, there were no major disruptions to events caused by outbreaks.
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For China, containing the coronavirus on an epic scale is not new. The country unhesitatingly puts entire cities on weeks-long lockdown, and conducts massive testing, tracing, and vaccination operations, under its “dynamic zero COVID” policy. It can’t afford to do otherwise: some estimates show that China would have suffered as many as 200 million infections and 3 million deaths by now, if it had attempted to “live with the virus” as most countries do. Instead, less than 131,000 cases and 4,924 deaths have been recorded in China since the start of the pandemic.
In this context, it was vital that the staging of the Olympics—with thousands of participants arriving from 91 countries—not lead to a wider community outbreak. To protect its citizens, China ran the Beijing Olympics on a strict “closed loop” system: participants and venues were confined to epidemiological bubbles, strictly segregated from the city at large.
Read more: What to Know About the 2022 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony
“They basically thought of the bubble as a similar kind of setting [to the rest of the country],” says Karen…
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Source : time
