If you find yourself believing that governments of all types have proven to be uniquely bad at learning from their mistakes over the course of a global pandemic, and of failing to make adjustments as new evidence is discovered, I give you the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee.
Provided by National Post Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games mascot Miraitowa poses with a display of the Olympic symbol after an unveiling ceremony of the symbol on Mt. Takao in Hachioji, west of Tokyo, Japan, April 14, 2021.
These are delicate times for the would-be Games of the XXXII Olympiad, with many of the conditions that were assumed to be achieved by punting them back a year having very much failed to materialize. Aggressive vaccination campaigns have allowed a small number of countries to wrestle COVID-19 under control, while others, Canada included, appear to be on a similar positive track. But positive cases have surged in much of South America, as well as parts of Africa and the Middle East, raising fears in Japan that they are poised to import a rash of infected people as travelling parties arrive for the Games. And Japan itself, which has largely avoided the various COVID surges that have been a public-health disaster in other parts of the world, is dealing with a recent rise in positive cases while rolling out a puzzlingly slow vaccination campaign. Those vaccination rates have increased in recent days, but Japan is now about where Canada was in mid-March in terms of percent of its population having received at least partial protection.
Perhaps not surprisingly, polling suggests a large majority of the Japanese public wants Tokyo 2020 to be scrapped, while medical groups, a leading newspaper (and Games sponsor) and some prominent citizens like billionaire businessman Masayoshi Son have called for a cancellation. The head of a doctors’ union said on Thursday that bringing thousands of people from around the world — the total number of visitors would be close to 25,000 — is not something that has been attempted since the pandemic began more than a year ago. “It’s very difficult to predict what this could lead to,” he said, according to The Associated Press. There were warnings of possible new mutant strains, which is a phrase that would cause many to tug nervously at their collars.
These are delicate times for the would-be Games of the XXXII Olympiad, with many of the conditions that were assumed to be achieved by punting them back a year having very much failed to materialize. Aggressive vaccination campaigns have allowed a small number of countries to wrestle COVID-19 under control, while others, Canada included, appear to be on a similar positive track. But positive cases have surged in much of South America, as well as parts of Africa and the Middle East, raising fears in Japan that they are poised to import a rash of infected people as travelling parties arrive for the Games. And Japan itself, which has largely avoided the various COVID surges that have been a public-health disaster in other parts of the world, is dealing with a recent rise in positive cases while rolling out a puzzlingly slow vaccination campaign. Those vaccination rates have increased in recent days, but Japan is now about where Canada was in mid-March in terms of percent of its population having received at least partial protection.
Perhaps not surprisingly, polling suggests a large majority of the Japanese public wants Tokyo 2020 to be scrapped, while medical groups, a leading newspaper (and Games sponsor) and some prominent citizens like billionaire businessman Masayoshi Son have called for a cancellation. The head of a doctors’ union said on Thursday that bringing thousands of people from around the world — the total number of visitors would be close to 25,000 — is not something that has been attempted since the pandemic began more than a year ago. “It’s very difficult to predict what this could lead to,” he said, according to The Associated Press. There were warnings of possible new mutant strains, which is a phrase that would cause many to tug nervously at their collars.
The response from Tokyo 2020, the IOC, and the government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has been to insist that the Olympic environment will be “safe and secure.” So, far two “playbooks”, documents that outlines the procedures for visiting athletes and support staff, and a separate one for travelling media, have been released, with final versions of each expected next month.
They are, at the least, puzzling. The media playbook has some expected countermeasures: visitors must have proof of negative tests upon arrival to Japan, they will be tested again at the airport, and then will quarantine for three days and be tested daily in that time. Media members must also submit a two-week “activity plan,” which is presumably for contact-tracing purposes in the event of a positive test. They are also encouraged to limit interactions to those within Olympic facilities and essentially live within a Tokyo 2020 bubble. It will enforce this, as far as I can tell, via the honour system. There will also be daily self-assessments in which you must declare yourself symptom-free.
Elsewhere, it explains that access to Games venues will require temperature checks, and that facilities will have the highest of sanitation standards. There will be physical distancing requirements in places like press boxes and the normally-bustling Main Press Centre, and masks will be required at all times. If that seems like a paragraph that might have been written for a Games that was actually going to be held in 2020, that’s because it might have been. Temperature checks? Surface cleaning? Spacing out desks even in an indoor facility? These are the infection-control measure of more than a year ago, before it was learned that asymptomatic carriers were a risk and before it was clear that aerosol transmission indoors meant that being six feet away from someone was still risky if they were sharing the same air for a sustained period of time. There is meanwhile no acknowledgement that outdoors is dramatically better than indoors and no suggestion of, for example, outdoor dining areas. The playbook simply advises that people eat alone.
Perhaps not surprisingly, some experts are issuing warnings about this. The New England Journal of Medicine said this week that the Tokyo playbooks “are not built on scientifically rigorous risk assessment” and that they “fail to consider the ways in which exposure occurs” and “the factors that contribute to exposure.” Those sound like considerable oversights. The Journal also notes that there is a lot of potential for holes in contract-tracing nets if they require human input. Other sports events have used things like wearable technology to track movements, as was the case in last year’s highly successful NBA bubble.
The most likely explanation for the Tokyo 2020’s less-than-ideal countermeasures is that an international event of its size requires some corners to be cut. Indoor facilities that were built with a hot Tokyo summer in mind, from athletes’ accommodation to venues to media facilities, can’t all be turned into outdoor tents. There is, meanwhile, no acknowledgement of vaccinations, or the fact that a considerable proportion of attendees will be inoculated by the time they arrive in Japan. Instead, the playbooks treat everyone the same, perhaps because as they were developed there was no guarantee that vaccinations would ramp up at the speed, at least in some countries, at which they have.
And while certain events over the course of the pandemic have created tight bubbles for participants, the sheer size of an Olympics that is taking place in the middle of a big city makes that impossible.
The best case for the organizers is that vaccination rates among visitors, and in Japan itself, are high enough by late July that the concerns of today will be much less of a problem. As it stands, implicit in the playbooks is the hope that all Olympic visitors will follow the rules and take responsibility for keeping themselves and others safe. A year-plus into this thing, it has not proven to be a winning strategy.
Postmedia News
sstinson@postmedia.com
