Team chef de mission Geoff Lipshutt announced on Wednesday that the official was identified as a close contact on their trip to Beijing.

Lipshut added the unidentified official can keep doing their job while being managed in the Games close contact program.

He added it's the first time a member of the Australian team has been identified as a close contact since they arrived for the Games.

It comes after Australian mixed curling competitor Tahli Gill tested positive when she arrived in Beijing.

Gill and teammate Dean Hewitt had to isolate for two days before they were cleared ahead of their competition starting on Wednesday night.

They will make history as the first Australian curling team to compete for an Olympic medal

Meanwhile Austrian Marita Kramer, the favourite for women's ski-jumping gold, has been forced to withdraw from the Winter Olympics due to a COVID-19 infection.

She becomes one of the highest-profile indicators of the shadow cast over the Beijing Games by the pandemic.

Veteran US women's bobsled pilot Elana Meyers Taylor fears the same fate after the World Cup champion tested positive on Tuesday.

Also on Wednesday, six players on the Danish men's ice hockey team were unable to train after a spate of positive cases.

But the team is optimistic that four of them are false positives and they will be out of isolation by early Thursday.

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago is also in isolation after testing positive.

This news came against the backdrop of test results showing athletes and team officials arriving in China are testing positive for COVID-19 at much higher rates than Olympic "stakeholders", a group which includes workers and media.

Kramer has ruled the World Cup with seven wins and three further podiums from 12 season events, but tested positive at the weekend and again on Tuesday.

The women's normal hill competition is on Saturday and Kramer does not have enough time to provide the four negative tests that are required by China to enter the country after a COVID-19 infection.

Meyers Taylor is already in China and revealed on social media: "After arriving to Beijing on January 27, on January 29 I tested positive for Covid-19. I am asymptomatic and currently at an isolation hotel - and yes I am completely isolated."

The only woman to win three Olympic bobsled medals for the US, with two silvers and a bronze, Meyers Taylor remains hopeful of competing as bobsled competition doesn't begin until February 13.

Games organisers said on Wednesday that 11 Olympics-related personnel had been hospitalised with COVID-19 since January 23 out of a total of 232 positive cases.

Organisers recorded 32 cases in the past 24 hours, 15 of them among new airport arrivals.

Brian McCloskey, chair of the Games medical expert panel, said none of the hospitalised individuals were in serious condition.

He said of the 232 cases, 163 had been from the airport and 69 from the Games closed loop.

More than 540,000 tests have been conducted since January 23.

With agencies

Australian Associated Press