As Beijing 2022 organizers continue to prepare for the upcoming Winter Games, they now have a new factor to consider: The omicron variant of COVID-19.
With a little more than two months to go until the start of the Beijing Olympics, health officials are working to study and understand the new variant, which was discovered in South Africa last week. But several countries have already moved to shut down their borders or restrict international travel due to omicron. And the World Health Organization has already described the overall global risk posed by the variant as "very high.