Olympic Diary: Welcome to three weeks of the daily throat swab

It's Lunar New Year time in China, where the Year of the Tiger kicked off on Tuesday. At the Beijing Olympics, it's also the Three Weeks of the Throat Swab.

If you're inside the closed loop — an area that admits only people with a role in the Olympic Games — you have to get a COVID test every day. It's not like last summer's Tokyo Games, where media had to spit into a tube every three days (unpleasant enough). In Beijing, you get a swab stuck down your throat every 24 hours.

The testing site at the Crowne Plaza Beijing Sun Palace Hotel is in a third-floor meeting room. Like all the Olympic personnel at the airport, the two women who work inside are draped in head-to-toe personal protective equipment. They scan your Olympic credential, slap a bar code on a tube and tell you to open wide. They are gentler than the testers at the airport, where a supervisor walked over to anyone having a gag reflex and shouted, "RELAX!!''

There is no skipping. Try it, and you will get a high-tech scarlet letter. On your way out of the hotel, a machine reads your credential and knows when your last test was; if it's been more than 24 hours, you are issued a "helpful reminder'' from the machine. Translation: You are not leaving the hotel until you get that swab.

In the Chinese zodiac, the Tiger symbolizes courage, strength and "exorcising evils.'' All three of those qualities ought to be helpful over the next three weeks, when warding off COVID will be at the top of everyone's New Year wish list.