we re just one week away from the winter olympics beginning in beijing and threatt olympic villages officially opened yesterday for competitors who are arriving from around the world. the downside, there are now more than 100 cases of covid found coming in for the games and half of those from people who were already inside of those villages. ivan watson live for us from hong kong. that s a big number. reporter: it is. especially in a country that is trying to keep the official covid case down to zero. but look at how hard that is in china right now. we have this map of confirmed omicron cases, all across the country, that we can show you. and that goes for the chinese capital as well, in the home of the upcoming winter olympics,
confirmed and growing covid case count, both in that olympic bubble, in the so-called closed loop of thousands of athletes and coaches and journalists and organizers, but also outside in the general chinese population in beijing, which is supposed to be walled off from the athletes. there, the chinese authorities are struggling with outbreaks of omicron and of the delta variant, and they re using some extreme measures to try to stamp it out. millions of people having to get tests. if you try to buy cold medicine or fever medicine over the counter in a pharmacy in china, in beijing, you have to take a get a negative covid test and register with the state. for athletes trying to get to beijing, it is incredibly stressful. if you can imagine, brianna, because at least two dozen athletes had to withdraw from last summer s tokyo olympics because they got covid, they
now is we are learning to manage and adapt around a virus who is killing people who do not have the defenses against it and is harming or infecting people to a much lesser extent who do have the defenses. we are going to adapt around that sort of unfortunate division in society right now and try to push people to vaccinations. but i ve gotten over talking about the end of covid. i talked about, you know, and write about this sort of adaptive recovery stage where we re just kind of adapting every day. i call it the now normal. that s what i say at home. we re here now, and don t talk about some finish line because that will drive you nuts. it s the holidays. many of us can see our family, maybe not in the same circumstances we had hoped, and that s now, right? and we ll see what happens tomorrow and just, you know, get vaccinated. do everything you can for those defenses. but stop thinking about a finish line. yeah. that s a very good attitude to have. i have a friend who says, okay.
application for an emergency-use authorization from the fda in 2022. at least from what pfizer is saying, by the time they get all of the necessary data and go through all of the procedure of getting an emergency-use authorization, unfortunately, it s not going to be until the second quarter. but you ought to really get the right dose and the right regimen for the children. so although you don t like there to be a delay, you want to get it right and that s what they are talking about. so tonight, once again, i know it sounds like groundhog s day, we have got a growing covid crisis to talk about. so i want to begin with dr. robert, he is the chair of the university of california san francisco department of medicine. doctor, thank you so much for joining us. let s get all these questions out and educate the folks who are watching. good evening to you. you have seen this new uk study that found no evidence that omicron causes less severe disease than delta.