PARIS (Reuters) – An Australian water polo player has been isolated at the Paris Games after testing positive for COVID, the country’s Olympic team chief Anna Meares said on Tuesday.
Close contacts of the athlete, who Meares did not name, were being monitored and tested, but the whole team would train as planned, she added.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were postponed by a year due to the pandemic and were held largely without spectators.
“We were due to have two players from water polo with us, however, currently we have had one athlete from their team isolating with COVID which was detected last night,” Meares told a news conference.
“So as a precaution they’re not joining us this morning.
“I need to emphasise that we are treating COVID no differently to other bugs like the flu. This is not Tokyo. The athlete is not particularly unwell and they are still training but sleeping in a single room.”
Meares said the athlete’s teammates would wear masks and adhere to social distancing measures.
“It was late last night when she presented with symptoms and the good thing is that having our own testing equipment means that we can get that information really, really quickly and intervene both in diagnosis and treatment,” Meares added.
“In terms of competitions, we will wait until she gets the all clear and we get the information from our chief medical officer Carolyn Broderick.”
French Health Minister Frederic Valletoux said there was no risk of a major COVID cluster in France.
“Of course COVID is here. We’ve seem a small peak” in cases, he told franceinfo broadcaster. “But we are far from what we saw in 2020, 2021, 2022.”
He added that there was no obligation to wear a mask because the number of cases was still low.
“Some precautions are being taken but, because the level at which COVID is spreading is very low, they depend on the organisers.”
(Reporting by Irene Wang, additional reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
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