Covid athletes to slip through net as team doctors given control of testing
ATHLETES with Covid-19 will be able to compete at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games after the health of any infected athlete has been delegated to doctors linked with each country’s team.
Around 12 athletes every day have been found to have coronavirus when they are tested upon arrival at the Games village. But the ability of those athletes to compete — which could number near to 100 by the time of the opening ceremony — now rests entirely with their own team doctor.
This could lead to the unsatisfactory situation where one athlete is ruled out of the Games because of Covid-19, while another athlete returning a similar viral load, called a cycle threshold (CT), is allowed to compete. So far, none of the 433 athletes in the Australian team have tested positive, team officials say. Behind the scenes, officials from some small Commonwealth nations believe some countries may turn a blind eye to athletes with Covid -19 as long as they appear well or are asymptomatic, and especially if they are medal contenders. The Commonwealth Games Federation medical doctor Peter Harcourt, who is also the AFL doctor, said that ‘these are difficult decisions” and acknowledged that some of the decisions could be unfair.
But he added: “Covid is unfair”. Dr Harcourt said that the Games had a quarantine hotel and good clinic support at the Games villages.
“We are further down road of the pandemic, we are on top of it and we can have a successful games with minimal issues,’’ he said.
Australia has adopted a particularly high state of vigilance, being more strict than other Commonwealth countries at these Games. Australian officials have demanded that its athletes wear masks at all times, even outdoors, and has banned them from attending sports events other than their own. Australia’s athletes will be also subject to internal testing at the first sign of any symptoms, using portable BioFire units that can batch-test for respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens in about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation upgraded monkey pox warnings but Games officials said they were not concerned.