AP – Just weeks before hosting the Beijing Winter Olympics, China is battling multiple coronavirus outbreaks in half a dozen cities, with the one closest to the capital driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

With the success of the Games and China’s national dignity at stake, Beijing is doubling down on its “zero-tolerance” COVID-19 policy.

Across China, more than 20 million people are in some form of lockdown, with many prevented from leaving their homes.

Tianjin, only about an hour from Beijing, is on high alert, although it has refrained from imposing a complete lockdown such as that in Xi’an, a city of 14 million.

Instead, it has sealed off several residential communities and universities, cancelled almost all flights, suspended high speed train service and closed highways. People leaving the city are required to present negative COVID-19 tests and receive special permission.

The city conducted mass testing for a second time for its 14 million residents on Wednesday, and asked them to stay put in their homes until they receive a negative result.

Tianjin’s proximity to Beijing makes the timing particularly fraught. During the Tokyo Olympics in July, Japan saw a widespread outbreak driven by the Delta variant.

Despite that, the disruptions for people in Tianjin remain relatively light.

“Everything is fine, the supermarkets and restaurants, you can go to all normally,” said Yu Xuan, who works at a university in Tianjin.

Wang Dacheng, another resident, said his father who has trouble walking was able to get tested in their apartment.

“Tianjin people are pretty optimistic, everyone’s been very calm and collected,” Wang said.

Elsewhere, in Xi’an to the west and several cities in Henan province, the measures are far more onerous, leading to complaints that people sequestered in their apartments were running out of food.

China has followed the uncompromising policy almost from the start of the pandemic, beginning with the unprecedented step of sealing off 11 million people in the central city Wuhan where the virus was first detected, along and other parts of Hubei province in January 2020.

It has been able to deal with local outbreaks through lockdowns, strict border controls and contact tracing aided by increased digital surveillance. The measures have kept the virus from spreading into a full-fledged national outbreak so far. The vaccination rate now tops 85 per cent.

With the Olympics due to begin on February 4 and support staff already arriving, the task has become even more critical. Whether Beijing’ s safeguards will hold up in face of the omicron variant is a crucial question.

“I think it truly is a critical juncture for China. Can it stave off Omicron?” said professor of Chinese politics Dali Yang from the University of Chicago.

China reported 124 domestically transmitted cases on Thursday, including 76 in Henan province and 41 in Tianjin. Authorities have reported a total of 104,379 cases, 3,460 of them currently active, and 4,636 deaths, a figure that hasn’t changed in months.

Beijing’s Olympic bubble is even stricter than Tokyo’s, which was mostly effective in stopping transmission, despite some leakages, said research director Kenji Shibuya from the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research and a public health expert.

Beijing faces a potentially bigger risk because the more contagious omicron variant has shown itself adept at evading vaccines.

Moreover, the lack of widespread outbreaks means the Chinese population is protected only by vaccines and not from antibodies produced by previous infections, said top Indian immunologist Dr Vineeta Bal.

“The Olympics would be the first trial,” said Bal, Omicron “can easily travel in China”.

Unlike the Tokyo Olympics bubble, there will be no contact between those inside and the outside world.

Officials, athletes, staff and journalists will travel between hotels and competition venues on specially designated vehicles in what is described as a closed-loop system.

Chinese will have to quarantine for three weeks upon leaving the bubble.

Even trash from within will be handled separately and Beijing’s traffic police say anyone involved in a collision with a designated Winter Olympics vehicle should take care to not come into contact with those on board and wait for a special team to handle matters.If strictly enforced, such measures should be able to prevent the spread of the virus within the bubble, said virologist Kei Saito at the University of Tokyo. But outside, it could be a different story.

“Omicron is three to four times more transmissible than Delta… I think it’s almost impossible to control the spread of Omicron,” Saito said.

Yet, despite the unabating global pandemic and controversies including a United States (US)-led diplomatic boycott, organisers are determined that the Games will go on.

“The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready,” the Chinese president and leader of the ruling Communist Party, Xi Jinping, said during an inspection tour of competition venues last week.

NASIRIYAH, IRAQ (AFP) – After war and insurgency kept them away from Iraq for decades, European archaeologists are making an enthusiastic return in search of millennia-old cultural treasures.

“Come and see!” shouted an overjoyed French researcher recently at a desert dig in Larsa, southern Iraq, where the team had unearthed a 4,000-year-old cuneiform inscription.

“When you find inscriptions like that, in situ, it’s moving,” professor of Mesopotamian civilisation at the College de France in Paris Dominique Charpin said.

The inscription in Sumerian was engraved on a brick fired in the 19th Century BCE.
“To the deity Shamash, king Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa, king of Sumer and Akkad,” Charpin translated with ease.

Behind him, a dozen other European and Iraqi archaeologists kept at work in a cordoned-off area where they were digging.

They brushed off bricks and removed earth to clear what appeared to be the pier of a bridge spanning an urban canal of Larsa, which was the capital of Mesopotamia just before Babylon, at the start of the second millennium BCE.

“Larsa is one of the largest sites in Iraq, it covers more than 200 hectares,” said researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research Regis Vallet, heading the Franco-Iraqi mission.

The team of 20 people have made “major discoveries”, he said, including the residence of a ruler identified by about 60 cuneiform tablets that have been transferred to the national museum in Baghdad.

Vallet said Larsa is like an archaeological playground and a ‘paradise’ for exploring ancient Mesopotamia, which hosted through the ages the empire of Akkad, the Babylonians, Alexander the Great, the Persians and Islamic rulers.

However, the modern history of Iraq – with its succession of conflicts, especially since the 2003 United States (US)-led invasion and its bloody aftermath – kept foreign researchers at bay.

Only since Baghdad declared victory in territorial battles against the Islamic State group in 2017 has Iraq “largely stabilised and it has become possible again” to visit, said Vallet.

“The French came back in 2019 and the British a little earlier,” he said. “The Italians came back as early as 2011.”

In late 2021, said Vallet, 10 foreign missions were at work in the Dhi Qar province, where Larsa is located.

Iraq’s Council of Antiquities and Heritage director Laith Majid Hussein said he is delighted to play host, and is happy that his country is back on the map for
foreign expeditions.

“This benefits us scientifically,” he told AFP in Baghdad, adding that he welcomes the “opportunity to train our staff after such a long interruption”.

Near Najaf in central Iraq, Ibrahim Salman of the German Institute of Archaeology is focussed on the site of the city of Al-Hira.

Germany previously carried out excavations here that ground to a halt with the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Equipped with a geomagnetic measuring device, Salman’s team has been at work in the one-time religious city that had its heyday under the Lakhmids, a pre-Islamic tribal dynasty of the 5th and 6th Centuries.

“Some clues lead us to believe that a church may have been located here,” he explained. He pointed to traces on the ground left by moisture which is retained by buried structures and rises to the surface.

“The moistened earth on a strip several metres long leads us to conclude that under the feet of the archaeologist are probably the walls of an ancient church,”
he said.

Al-Hira is far less ancient than other sites, but it is part of the diverse history of the country that serves as a reminder, according to Salman, that “Iraq, or Mesopotamia, is the cradle of civilisations. It is as simple as that!”