Covid cases have spiked every summer since 2020, and this season is no exception. A Covid wave is once again sweeping across much of the world and has reached the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But the Games went on without a hitch, despite at least 40 athletes testing positive for the virus, according to the World Health Organization. One of them, American track and field star Noah Lyles, ran in the men’s 200 meters on Aug. 8 despite testing positive for COVID just two days earlier. After winning the bronze medal in that race, he received medical attention and was taken off the track in a wheelchair. Lyles, who also has Asthma sufferer, said he felt shortness of breath and chest pain after the race and Covid had “definitely” affected his performance.
The laissez-faire approach to COVID-19 at the world’s biggest and most prestigious sporting event falls far miniature of the strict restrictions used at the last few Olympic Games, raising questions about how society should deal with the virus both at huge public events and in everyday life.
“Covid-19 is still with us,” Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, told a conference news summary August 6. Data from the organization’s surveillance system covering 84 countries shows that the percentage of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 has been rising for several weeks.
The 2024 Paris Olympics have no specific COVID-19 rules, a stark contrast to the two Olympics that were held during the pandemic. The 2021 Tokyo Games and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games required masks, testing and isolation. The Tokyo Games, which were postponed from 2020, had a complete ban on the public in Beijing. In Paris, organizers are letting athletes and teams decide for themselves how to handle positive cases.
In other words, they are treating Covid like the flu and the common frigid. This equivalence worries some public health experts.
“COVID-19 continues to be very different from other seasonal or circulating respiratory diseases,” says Mark Cameron, assistant professor of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “The ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to generate variants that impact public health in ways that are outside the norm.”
Specifically, a modern set of variants known as FLiRT has dominated in recent months and is driving the current surge. While these variants are unlikely to cause more severe disease than previous strains, they appear to be more contagious.
Brian Labus, an epidemiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says we should take Covid more seriously than the flu and frigid. “It has a higher mortality rate,” he says. “It can be much more serious, and then there’s the problem of long Covid.” In delayed June about 5.3 percent of American adults reported that they were suffering from long COVID-19, meaning that their COVID-19 symptoms lasted three months or longer.