Covid-19 cases rise in Winter Olympics bubble on opening day
- 45 people test positive, including 25 athletes and team officials, health authorities say
- Most infections detected on arrival at Beijing’s capital airport
In all, 25 of the cases were athletes and team officials and the rest were found among other “stakeholders”, a category that includes the media and Games partners, the event’s organising committee said on Saturday. Twenty-one cases were reported a day earlier.
Officials said 26 of the new cases were identified on arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport while the remaining 19 were picked up during 71,709 tests conducted within the bubble.
Games participants enter the closed loop on arrival in Beijing, a city battling to contain outbreaks of the Omicron and Delta variants.
Wang Jianhui, deputy director of Beijing’s disease control centre, said on Saturday that Olympics-related patients would be put into five different categories for separate treatment at different hospitals to avoid cross infection, Bloomberg reported.
Huang Chun, deputy director of the organising committee’s Pandemic Prevention and Control Office, said last week that an increase in cases was expected as the number of arrivals increased.
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