COVID-19 cases have spiked every summer since 2020, and this season is no exception. A new wave of COVID-19 is sweeping much of the world, and it has reached the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But the Games have gone ahead without interruption, despite at least 40 athletes testing positive for the virus, according to the World Health Organization. One of them, American track star Noah Lyles, ran the men’s 200-meter race on August 8 despite having tested positive for Covid just two days earlier. After winning a bronze medal in the race, he received medical attention and was removed from the track in a wheelchair. Lyles, who also has a history of asthma, said she was short of breath and experienced chest pain after the race and that Covid “definitely” affected her performance.
The laissez-faire attitude to COVID at the world’s largest and most prestigious sporting event is a far cry from the strict restrictions seen at recent Olympics, and raises questions about how society should manage the virus both at large public events and in everyday life in the future.
“Covid-19 is still very much with us,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, at a conference news summary August 6. Data from the organization’s surveillance system in 84 countries shows that the percentage of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 has been increasing for several weeks.
There are no specific rules for combating COVID-19 at the Paris 2024 Olympics, in stark contrast to the two Olympics held during the height of the pandemic. Masks, testing and isolation were required at the Tokyo 2021 Games and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games. Spectators were banned entirely at the Tokyo Games, which were rescheduled from 2020, and their presence was limited in Beijing. In Paris, organisers are allowing athletes and teams to decide for themselves how to proceed in the event of positive cases.
In other words, they are apparently treating Covid as if it were the flu or the common cold. That equivalence worries some public health experts.
“COVID-19 remains very different from other seasonal or circulating respiratory illnesses,” said Mark Cameron, associate professor of quantitative and population health sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “The constantly evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to generate variants that impact public health beyond the norm.”
Specifically, a new set of variants known as FLiRT has dominated in recent months and is driving the current surge. While these variants are not likely to cause more severe disease than previous strains, they do appear to be more transmissible.
Brian Labus, an epidemiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says we should take COVID more seriously than the flu and the common cold. “It has higher mortality rates,” he says. “The disease can be much more severe, and there is the added problem of long COVID.” By late June, About 5.3 percent of American adults reported that they are experiencing long Covid, meaning Covid symptoms lasting three months or longer.
