When China’s leader Xi Jinping inspected the Beijing Winter Olympics venues last week, he laid out his vision for a “green, safe and simple” event.
But diplomatic boycotts and, increasingly, the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus may make safety and simplicity near impossible to achieve, at least by Beijing’s stringent “zero Covid” standards.
With less than a month to go until the opening of the Winter Games, Chinese officials are racing to extinguish a spate of coronavirus infections around the country, including several locally transmitted cases of the Omicron variant.