OLYMPIC VISITORS UNDER STRICT LOCKDOWN
Beijing's anti-virus measures a far cry from Tokyo Games,
The last step of the long, multileg journey to China for Beijing 2022 seemed like it would be the most straightforward one: Bus from airport to hotel.
But, after 28 hours or so of travel, that final step had ground to a halt. A bus full of journalists — full at half-capacity in these times — was loaded, luggage was stored, and ... we sat there. No one was quite sure what was happening. Eventually, after more than an hour, the reason for the delay became clear. Our bus was not a solo act. It was part of a convoy of six buses, all being led out of Capital International Airport by a security vehicle. The parade didn't travel on normal roads. Instead, we wound along a route normally used by luggage trucks and the like: under the jetways, past the airliners, where we could be seen by people in the terminal, had there been anyone in the terminal to see us.
As our bus rounded a slow corner, I noticed a distinct whiff of what smelled like cleaning solution. Weird, that. The next time we rounded a slow corner, I saw why: A worker was spraying the bus with disinfectant. They were positioned along the route, dousing the vehicles as they passed.
Such is life inside the Beijing 2022 bubble: even the vehicles must use hand sanitizer. If they could figure out a way to strap a mask on a bus, they'd do it.
Only six months separate Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022, despite the numerals in their names, and the COVID-19 pandemic has loomed over each of them. And what is striking, after a couple of days in the Chinese capital, is the disparity of the pandemic management strategies they employed. Tokyo asked nicely. Beijing doesn't give you a choice.
Both events operated under the same general principle, that Olympic participants — which include tens of thousands of athletes, coaches, staff, media and volunteers — would be separated from the general public to minimize the risk of infection in both directions. The public wouldn't be able to pass COVID into the Olympics and derail the whole thing, and the many foreigners arriving in Japan and China would be walled off from the masses.
But the dramatic difference between Tokyo and Beijing is that in the former, the separation of the Olympics from the city at large was essentially a polite suggestion. In Beijing, it is a strict division, one patrolled by people with guns. Perhaps not surprisingly in a country famous for a Great Wall, there seem to be no issues here keeping the one group of people separate from the other.
After that bus finally snaked its way out of the airport, dripping with disinfectant, it went to our hotel, which was surrounded by temporary fencing. The front gate wasn't just locked, it had large metal bars on either side that had to be hauled away by guards before the doors could be swung open. This is what Beijing 2022 calls the “closed loop,” which is just that.
Olympic types can travel from hotel to press centre to venue to Olympic Village and back again, but only on official transport and past police checkpoints at either end. You can't walk from one Olympic place to another, nor go for a stroll outside the hotel. The loop is well and truly closed.
Tokyo's Olympic bubble, by comparison, was a COVID containment strategy as designed by Novak Djokovic. Participants were instructed to avoid bars, restaurants and public transportation, but there was no real enforcement of these requirements other than the honour system. The city was wide open to Olympic visitors, as was evident from the emails from organizers who occasionally pleaded with the press to knock it off with the late-night carousing, already. (I am paraphrasing here.) That soft touch largely seemed to have worked, in a pre-omicron world, as the Olympics came and went and no COVID surge could be attributed to the event.
China is taking no such chances. Its zero-tolerance approach to the virus was evident the moment we stepped off the plane here, where the army of volunteers that greeted Olympic arrivals was dressed in full biohazard gear. Mask, face shield, bodysuit, goggles, gloves, boots. Sometimes extra gloves and boots on top of the first layer. Even the phones they carried were in plastic bags. You could spray those volunteers with a literal firehose of COVID and they wouldn't be able to catch it in those getups.
Outside the airport, the COVID countermeasures haven't been quite so extreme, but nor are they subtle. At the hotel, the staff wear masks, face shield, gloves, goggles and a blue surgical cap in addition to the usual hotel uniform. It must be particularly jarring for visitors from parts of the world where even mask requirements are a thing of the past. Also jarring: the daily COVID tests, which involve a throat swab taken by a nurse who is evidently not interested in a comfortable testing experience. It's another stark contrast with Tokyo 2020, which used saliva tests and trusted participants to mind their own samples. We didn't know how good we had it.
So far, Beijing organizers say the detection of COVID within the closed loop is at acceptable levels: About 200 cases so far, almost all discovered upon arrival in Beijing. Those who test positive are immediately moved to isolation facilities, where multiple negative tests will be required before they're let out of quarantine. From there, they will be free to wander the closed loop again.
Not that a lot of wandering is involved.