Threat of Covid-19 spreading grows at Tokyo Olympics with three infections at athletes village. What happened to 85 per cent vaccination rate pledge?
- More than a dozen Olympic-related positive tests have been recorded in Tokyo since visitors started arriving for the 2020 Games, including a first case at the Athletes Village
- Singapore’s NTU professor Fabian says 70 to 80 per cent vaccination rate is usually enough to achieve herd immunity within a population
Our Tokyo Trail series looks at key issues and athletes in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics, which are scheduled for late July.
It started with a Ugandan coach testing positive for coronavirus on arrival in Tokyo on June 20. Three days later, an athlete in the same team returned a positive result.
A Serbian rower tested positive on arrival on July 4 and a Lithuanian was next five days later. On July 14, seven staff members at a hotel in Hamamatsu housing Brazilian athletes were shown to be infected.
On Friday, a member of the Nigerian delegation became the first Olympic visitor to be hospitalised, and the next day, organisers revealed that the coronavirus had finally penetrated the Athletes Village – set to accommodate 11,000 people over two weeks – where an unnamed person tested positive and was sent to a hotel for isolation. By Sunday morning, the cases of infection had risen to three. If that wasn’t enough, International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Ryu Seung-min, of South Korea, tested positive after arriving in Tokyo. Saturday’s official tally alone was 15 infections, before Ryu’s case was revealed.
The Japanese capital is still under a state of emergency amid a six-month-high surge in new Covid-19 cases but the IOC is standing firm in the face of widespread calls to cancel the Games, promising a safe and secure Olympics with at least 85 per cent of all athletes and officials to be fully vaccinated.
Covid-19 cases at the Olympics may, for now, be a trickle, but does the 85 per cent vaccination pledge offer adequate protection to prevent a flood and a potential catastrophe of Olympic proportions? It just about does, said Fabian Lim Chin Leong, associate professor of exercise physiology at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
