With more than 30 new COVID-19 cases being detected daily ahead of the Beijing Olympics, organizers said Wednesday they aren't worried and expect numbers to drop within days.
A total of 32 new cases -- 15 in tests of people arriving at the airport and 17 within the Olympic bubbles -- were reported by the Beijing organizing committee Wednesday, two days before the opening ceremony. The average was 31 cases over the past three days.
Athletes and team officials accounted for nine of the latest cases, and 23 were "stakeholders," a category that includes workers and media. Athletes testing positive now could miss their events.
Eleven people have been treated at the hospital for symptoms among the 232 positive tests registered since Jan. 23, though "none of those are seriously ill in any way," Olympic medical adviser Brian McCloskey said.
The Danish Olympic federation announced that forwards Matthias Asperup and Nick Olesen tested positive for the coronavirus and went into isolation. Former NHL forward Mikkel Boedker, veteran defenseman Markus Lauridsen and two taxi squad players also missed practice after testing positive, though the team believed the results to be inaccurate and expected them back on the ice soon.
"Fortunately, it looks like four of them were false positive, we are hoping," longtime NHL center Frans Nielsen said. "I wouldn't called it 'scared,' but you're always worried about, 'Is there going to be more?'"
Coach Heinz Ehlers said everyone tested negative twice within the previous 48 hours before leaving Denmark for Beijing. The National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation of Denmark said it did not believe any other members of the nation's 62-person delegation would need to be isolated.
Ukrainian biathlete Olena Bilosiuk, a gold medalist in the women's relay in 2014, also tested positive for COVID-19 in Beijing.
Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago also tested positive for COVID-19, becoming at least the second International Olympic Committee member with a positive test. He has been placed in isolation in Beijing.
Two-time Olympic hockey medalist Emma Terho, the IOC's most senior athlete representative, is also in an isolation hotel after testing positive on arrival.
The overall numbers are not worrying for the Olympics, said McCloskey, who is leading the organizers' medical expert panel.
"Virtually every country in the world at the moment has a higher level of COVID than China," he said, explaining why the risk of detection is greater at the airport and steadily decreasing.
Daily PCR tests are taken from every Olympic athlete, sports official and worker -- more than 65,000 tests on Tuesday. All are living separate from the general public in what organizers call a closed-loop community.
"For the first few days in the closed loop, the risk is still a bit higher because of the risk of people incubating the disease very slowly," McCloskey said.
After spending about five days at the Olympics, "the risk comes down to equivalent to the local population risk -- very, very low," he said.
China has pursued a zero-tolerance public health policy during the pandemic, which spread from an initial outbreak in the country more than two years ago.
Olympic advisers are also looking for trends beyond the bare statistics at the Games.
"The main challenge is not the number of cases, it's the indication of whether there is spread within the closed loop," said McCloskey, who is focused on spotting connected cases of community transmission that might threaten staging events. "We are obviously nowhere near that level at present."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.