China’s Winter Olympics (feat. Covid-19)

Today, Explained

Vox

News, Daily News, Politics

4.3 • 10.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Games don’t begin until February 4, but the drama around the pandemic, free speech, and diplomatic boycotts has been building for months. NPR’s Emily Feng explains from Beijing. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1:10.0	It seems like it was just mere months ago we were talking about the hot mess COVID Olympics in Japan.
1:15.6	And now it's already time to talk about the COVID Olympics in China. It might be a little early to
1:20.8	determine whether it's going to be a mess or not though. It's going to be a mess.
1:28.3	It's going to be an extraordinary Olympics. You've got the diplomatic boycats in these geopolitical
1:32.9	tensions. Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced the boycats citing China's ongoing genocide and
1:37.9	human rights abuses. And then you've got a population that has been trained to be hyper-alert
1:42.8	about every single COVID case, strict lockdowns of infected neighborhoods, travel restrictions,
1:47.7	and the mass testing of entire cities. Basically, it's a country that's like the most anti-COVID,
1:52.8	bringing in thousands of athletes and journalists during a pretty bad time in the global pandemic.
1:58.4	The Omicron variant is on the move. Countries across the world are starting to see a dramatic rise
2:03.7	in the number of the daily recorded cases of COVID-19. So it'll get interesting.
2:12.4	Emily Fang is MPR's Beijing correspondent. The games don't get underway until February
	...

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