The Covid Summer Games

You’ve probably seen by now that one of the stars of the Olympics collapsed in Paris last night with covid.

Noah Lyles, the American 100m Olympic champion, was wheeled off the track after falling to the ground at the end of the 200m race, struggling to breathe.

Despite starting as the favourite to win, he finished third.

It was subsequently revealed he had tested positive for covid two days earlier, just after winning 100m gold, and had been suffering with a fever, chills, cough. All the classic symptoms of this decade’s most in-form viral illness.

Lyles will not compete in the 4x100m relay, ending his chance of another medal.

One of the stars of the Olympics collapsing with covid on live TV in front of a global audience and being forced to withdraw from the games after we’ve been repeatedly told covid is over (and if it isn't over it is definitely now mild) really does put a ribbon on the last few years.

The event is another chapter in this sad covid summer, a summer which began with Taylor Swift superspreading her way across three continents, leaving a trail of covid in her wake. This was followed by cyclist after cyclist dropping out of the Tour de France, or struggling on, with covid. After this the US President withdrew from the presidential race while sick with covid. Then the Olympics started.

With zero precautions being taken by organizers and with a new variant hungry for willing hosts, the Olympics have been riddled with covid from day one.

More than 40 Australian athletes alone went down with covid, including almost half the Australian swimming team. Then Britain’s Olympic champion swimmer Adam Peaty pulled out from races, saying the illness had caused him to suffer ‘the worst week of his life health-wise.’ American swimmers swam below par with covid. A German decathlete withdrew with covid, then the German long-jump champion Malaika Mihambo, after being beaten into second place was, like Lyles, wheeled off the track, struggling to breathe. Her collapse came after she caught covid in June and didn’t fully recover. American boxer Jennifer Lozano caught covid before her gold medal fight, lost and then said she struggled to breathe. The American gymnast Jade Carey, the Tokyo Olympic floor gold medallist, didn't even qualify for the final after covid led to a mistake-riddled qualifying. These are just the ones I know of. I’m sure there are more. And many more athletes who never disclosed they were ill.

Justin put it better than I could.

Isn’t it though?

Tokyo was called the covid games. But Tokyo has nothing on Paris.

All of this while covid infections in the US top one million per day, as this summer wave builds to infect more than any summer wave since the start of the pandemic. Covid deaths in the US are climbing to 600 a week. In August. Forecasts are for a peak of 1.4 million infections per day by September.

Then before you know it we’ll be in the northern hemisphere winter wave.

What’s happening at the Olympics in Paris is emblematic of the broader societal denial, the desire to construct a social reality at odds with the physical reality of a still-existing and dangerous virus. I have written a lot about this, here and here, if you’re interested in the social dynamics behind forever covid.

Then there were the athletes who never arrived because they have long covid.

One of these was Nathan Ikon Crumpton, American Samoa's 100m sprint national record holder. Earlier this week he uploaded a video where he talks about how a covid infection in January this year developed into long covid and stopped him from competing in the Paris Olympics.

‘Mild’ omicron covid can still take down a young person in peak physical condition.

Covid is not a cold and never will be a cold.

Which is why the words of Lyles’ team mate Justin Bednarek were so tragic. He said:

"I don’t care. I don’t view those things as a big deal. I am healthy and do everything to ensure my body is healthy. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t get sick easily.”

Bednarek’s words, whilst demonstrating his ignorance about the danger covid has to even ‘healthy’ people, also reflect the extreme individualism which dominates modern society. He has no thought about his role in a chain of transmission, a chain that might end with a vulnerable person catching covid and getting very sick or dying. It’s all about how he feels he’d handle the virus. The idea of a society doesn’t cross his mind.

But is he wrong? What sort of society even exists any more? In the context of public health, there is none. Governments do nothing to stop the spread of the world’s leading cause of infectious disease death. Hospitals, the places people go when they are sick, are doing nothing to stop sick people being infected in places of supposed safety.

The denial of covid is obviously concerning for the immediate harm it is doing to people, but it is also a sign that things are going fundamentally wrong at a level beyond the day-to-day.

Literature about the collapse of societies, in particular I’m thinking of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, tells us that societies undergoing a process of degradation step down to more dangerous but widely accepted new norms. One million people getting sick per day in the summer with an airborne virus - something that never happened before but is now considered unremarkable - is a standout example of this process.

The world’s fittest, strongest, fastest athletes at the world’s showcase sporting event being picked off by a virus and it being shrugged off - something that never happened before - is a standout example of this process.

Nothing good happens to societies when basic rules of decency are cast off, when a Bednarek-ian survival of the fittest attitude dominates, permeating from the top down, leeching out everywhere, from the hospitals to the running tracks.

This virus is a test.

The body of one of the world’s best athletes strung out on a running track, struggling to breathe in front of the world, shows that we’re failing it.