Olympic advisers at ease with COVID rate, see cases falling

BEIJING — With more than 30 new COVID-19 cases being detected daily ahead of the Beijing Olympics, organizers said Wednesday they aren’t worried and expect numbers to drop within days. Eleven people have been treated at the hospital for a symptom among the 232 positive tests registered since Jan. 23, though “none of those are seriously ill in any way,” Olympic medical adviser Brian McCloskey said. “For the first few days in the closed loop the risk is still a bit higher because of the risk of people incubating the disease very slowly,” McCloskey said. “The main challenge is not the number of cases, it’s the indication of whether there is spread within the closed loop,” said McCloskey, who is focused on spotting connected cases of community transmission that might threaten staging events.