Anika Begay
Covid cases have risen every summer since 2020, and this season is no exception. A wave of Covid is once again sweeping much of the world, and it has reached the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But the Games went ahead without a break, despite at least 40 athletes testing positive for the virus, according to the World Health Organization. One of those, U.S. track star Noah Lyles, ran the men’s 200-meter race on Aug. 8 despite testing positive for COVID just two days earlier. After winning a bronze medal in the race, he received medical attention and was wheeled off the track in a wheelchair. Lyles, who also has a history of asthma, said he felt short of breath and chest pain after the race and that COVID “definitely” affected his performance.
The laissez-faire approach to Covid at the world’s biggest and most prestigious sporting event is a far cry from the tight restrictions seen at the last Olympics, and raises questions about how society should handle 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, in a press conference on 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 rising for several weeks.
There are no specific rules for Covid-19 at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a stark contrast to the two Olympic Games held during the pandemic. Masks, testing and isolation were mandatory at the 2021 Tokyo Games and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Public spectators were banned entirely at the Tokyo Games, which were rescheduled from 2020, and were limited in Beijing. In Paris, organizers are allowing athletes and teams to decide for themselves how to proceed if there are positive cases.
In other words, they are apparently treating Covid like the flu and the common cold. This equivalence worries some public health experts.
“COVID-19 is still very different from other seasonal or circulating respiratory diseases,” says Mark Cameron, associate professor of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “The ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus is still generating variants that are having public health impacts beyond the norm.”
Specifically, a new set of variants known as FLiRT have dominated in recent months and are driving the current surge. While these variants aren’t capable of causing more severe disease than previous strains, they 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’s the added problem of long Covid.” As of late June, about 5.3 percent of U.S. adults reported having long Covid, or Covid symptoms that last three months or more.
