Why the Summer Olympic Games in Paris may have been a COVID ‘success’ story

Written by ABC AUDIO on August 15, 2024

(NEW YORK) — As the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris came to an end this weekend, most of the conversation surrounded the number of medals won, and the number of records broken.

However, there was also another topic at hand: the presence of COVID-19 at the Olympics.

At least 40 athletes tested positive for COVID, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), including several Australian swimmers, a British swimmer and a German decathlon competitor.

Additionally, American track and field star Noah Lyles won bronze in the 200-meter race after testing positive for COVID-19 two days prior.

Despite the number of cases, public health experts told ABC News that the Paris Games were actually a success and a testament to how far the world has come since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“COVID-19 was so less disruptive in Paris than it was in Tokyo or Beijing because of what science and medicine have done over the past four years,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told ABC News.

“That should be the story, that we went from something that was disrupting the entire world to something that is now kind of a rank-and-file respiratory virus. I think that’s the real story. Here is the success of humanity with tackling this scientific problem, and the minds that went to work on this problem and made it something that is no longer a major concern for a lot of the population,” Adalja said.

How the Paris Olympics were different

The Paris Olympics were billed as the first games with some sense of normalcy after the strict restrictions seen during the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

Athletes were under strict testing and quarantine protocols and had to follow stringent mitigation measures to participate in the 2021 or 2022 Games. No spectators were allowed at the Tokyo Games while a limited number were allowed at the Beijing Games.

Comparatively, there were no formal requirements for regular COVID-19 testing or reporting for the Paris Games, either in general or for specific events.

An athlete testing positive did not require them to sit out from an event either. Participating following a positive test was left up to the discretion of the athlete, team and medical staff. Additionally, there were no restrictions regarding spectators.

“The Paris Olympics were something that really resembled pre-COVID Olympics, nothing like what we saw in Beijing, nothing like what we saw in Tokyo,” Adalja said. “And I think that reflects the fact that the context regarding the virus that causes COVID-19 has changed a lot over the past four years.”

COVID at the Paris Games

Only about 40 COVID-19 cases were confirmed among athletes at the 2024 Summer Games. Experts say it’s not out of the ordinary that cases would occur and that, likely, the total is an undercount of cases.

“I am sure that that is a gross under-representation of the actual number of cases,” Dr. Pedro Piedra, a professor in the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology and Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, told ABC News.

“[COVID] testing is not required, and testing for other respiratory viruses has really not been required either, and whenever you have such an event, it is an excellent ground for viruses to transmit. And that’s not just unique to the Olympics. That’s anytime you have a lot of individuals cluster over time together,” he continued.

The Australian Olympic Committee said last week that 16 athletes tested positive for COVID, at least seven of whom were swimmers.

The British Olympic Committee said swimmer Adam Peaty tested positive for COVID-19 less than 24 hours after winning silver in the men’s 100-meter breaststroke final.

Perhaps, most famous, Lyles — the American sprinter — revealed after winning bronze in the 200-meter men’s final that he had tested positive two days beforehand. Lyles drew a great deal of criticism for running the race unmasked and not publicly revealing his diagnosis before the competition.

However, experts said that COVID-19 is beginning to be considered an endemic virus, meaning it is typically present, and should be treated like other endemic viruses, like the flu.

“A lot has changed, and this virus is now what we would call an endemic virus; it’s basically part of the new respiratory viruses that circulate within our community,” Piedra said. “We don’t try to test every virus for every illness that we have. If we did, I think it would cost significantly, and on many occasions, we don’t have any form of treatment or prevention methods.”

Adalja said because COVID-19 is being considered an endemic respiratory virus, each individual case is less significantly important.

“We have so many tools that science and medicine have given us that make COVID-19 so much more manageable in 2024 than it was in 2020, 2021, 2022,” he said. “So, in that sense, the fact that you’re not hearing about every case as it occurs is just like you don’t hear about every case of influenza that occurs.”

He continued, “I think that the fact that people are back to their lives, that people are winning medals when they have COVID-19 really shows that despite all of the obstacles the governments put in place to deal with COVID appropriately, scientists, physicians delivered and developed so many tools that were able to now live our lives in the midst of COVID-19 and not have It be as disruptive as it once was.”