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Cocktails and hazmat suits mingle in the Beijing Olympics bubble

  • Posted Feb 4, 2022 11:29 by Anthony Ellis
  • 2393
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International: Bartenders and waitering staff are made to wear a full hazmat suit in a restaurant at a ski resort in Zhangjiakou.

A bartender in the Chinese ski resort of Zhangjiakou wears a blue and white hazmat suit as he pours a cocktail, before passing the drink to a similarly attired waiter who shuffles across the room in blue plastic booties to deliver the drink.

The bar guests at the Nanshanli Condotel on Wednesday evening, most of them Olympics-related personnel and journalists, could see only a sliver of their servers' faces behind white masks and giant plastic face shields.

A giant "closed loop" entirely separates the thousands of international athletes, officials and journalists arriving for the start of the Games on Friday from the general public.

The scene, which some participants have likened to dystopian fiction, is playing out around Olympics venues in the capital and Zhangjiakou in neighboring Hebei province as Chinese officials try to minimize the chances of the Beijing Winter Games sparking a fresh coronavirus outbreak.

A room service order of a club sandwich and fries came wrapped in plastic and delivered by a worker again in full PPE.

Hallways and lobbies of venues and hotels are constantly sprayed with disinfectant, giving the air a distinct smell of Lysol. Most days at the media center, workers in PPE emblazoned with the colorful Olympic rings spray down floors and a robot sprays disinfectant into the air.

The "closed loop" will allow the athletes, coaches and other officials to shuttle between accommodation and Olympic venues on official transport but they are not allowed out to move freely in public.

Everyone in the "closed loop", which includes the 4,500 athletes who have arrived so far for the Feb. 4-20 Games and 20,000 local volunteers, are subjected to daily PCR tests. Officials conducted 67,137 tests on Wednesday.

Olympics organisers said on Wednesday they had recorded 32 COVID-19 cases in the previous 24 hours, 15 of them new airport arrivals. Brian McCloskey, chair of the Beijing 2022 medical expert panel, said he expected the daily number to drop once the number of participants arriving begins to decrease.

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