Swedish journalist becomes the story in Beijing COVID-19 quarantine

ZANGJIAKOU: A Swedish journalist who was whisked off to isolation by ambulance at the Beijing Winter Olympics has found a way to keep working, writing a diary of his time in Chinese quarantine for his newspaper.

Philip Gadd tested positive for COVID-19 after landing in Beijing on Wednesday (Feb 2) to cover the Winter Olympics and quickly found himself shut off from the rest of the world in a designated quarantine hotel.

Gadd's first columns for the Expressen newspaper, where he works as a reporter and web TV anchor, covered his experiences as "spacemen" - officials dressed from head to toe in personal protective equipment (PPE) - transported him to the facility, far away from the athletes chasing gold and the media covering them.

Gadd was kitted out for the journey in his own PPE, complete with a mask, visor, gloves and a one-piece white suit that covered him from head to toe.

"It was a really terrifying experienced and it just felt like ... it didn't feel real. It felt like as if I was in a movie, a sci-fi movie or something," he told Reuters in a Zoom interview from his quarantine hotel.

"It was really hard to understand that everything happened to me. I was really far away from home. I'm from Sweden, so I have travelled all the way to China and I was just by myself, nobody to speak to, in an ambulance."

Journalists covering the games are subjected to daily COVID-19 tests, obliged to wear masks and are separated by metal barriers from athletes they are interviewing in mixed zones.

Gadd tested negative on Saturday and is now awaiting a second negative result so that he can join his colleagues and cover the cross-country events as planned.

He said that the Internet was good in the hotel so he had been able to help his colleagues