Feasibility Analysis of Athletes Visiting Tourist Attractions During the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics

Background: Strict closed-loop management (CLM) proposed by the Tokyo 2020 Olympics prevented SARS-CoV-2 spreading, but also limited the athletes’ behavior. For avoiding the impact of CLM on athletes, we analyzed the feasibility that allowing athletes, alternate athletes and officials (AAO) to visit tourism attractions in Beijing and Hebei.Methods: We conducted a deterministic epidemic model to simulation the trend of COVID-19 during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics if AAO were allowed to visit tourism attractions in Beijing and Hebei. We simulated the impact of different combinations of non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 in China, including different infection rates among AAO, domestic vaccination rates, vaccine efficacy against infection, nucleic acid tests (NAT) frequency and daily contacts per person.Findings: There were significant differences among combinations of NPIs and with the gradual relaxation of NPIs, the number of domestic infections varied from 18·8 to 91,725,768·7 in 40 days. The number of deaths was 0 ~ 300·1 based on case facility rate (CFR) of high-income countries. When the vaccine efficacy against infection was 30%, the optimal combination was 80% population vaccination, 14 daily contacts per person, NAT every 3 days which could precisely control the number of death lower than one.Interpretation: Allowing AAO participated in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics to visit tourist attractions in Beijing and Hebei is feasible, as long as increasing vaccination rates, conducting regular NAT and reducing daily contacts among domestic population.Funding: NSCF (No.91546203, 72174004) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (No.2021YFF0306004).Declaration of Interest: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Ethical Approval: Our study is an article of epidemic model which does not require ethical review.