COVID-19 anxiety overtakes Olympics as athletes test positive

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Growing concern over COVID-19 dominates focus on the Tokyo Olympics ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony, as an emerging infection this week sidelined athletes from the games.

After the pandemic delayed the Olympics by a year, the virus continues to wreak havoc at the Games as dozens of athletes and staff have tested positive in the days leading up to the global competition.

As of Tuesday, organizers said 71 cases of COVID-19 had been identified as being linked to the Tokyo Olympics, including 31 among the international visitors who flock to the Japanese capital for the games.

The number of cases was “actually very low and probably lower than we would expect if anything,” Brian McCluskey, the IOC’s health advisor, said earlier this week.

“If I thought all the tests we had would be negative, I wouldn’t bother taking the tests in the first place,” he said during a briefing. “We do the tests because it’s a way to filter out people who might get an infection and who might later become at risk.”

Public health experts say such cases are inevitable as the pandemic continues around the world, but strict mitigation measures have a chance of containing the virus and halting the outbreak of the dangerous disease at the Olympics.

Lena Win, an emergency physician and professor of public health at George Washington University, said the Olympics constituted the “ultimate test” of whether rigorous testing, quarantine, contact tracing and isolation could contain the virus.

She suggested that should cases worsen, organizers could consider other containment protocols such as requiring N95 masks before deciding to cancel games as a whole.

Wen acknowledged that there are risks with “any mass event” spreading the virus and variants to new places, but said travel and other events pose similar risks.

“I think in some ways the Olympics are unfairly marked when there are so many other sources of COVID-19 risk going on all the time, including here in the United States,” she said, citing the requirements for the lifted indoor mask.

The IOC previously released a 70-page handbook for athletes asking them to take precautions such as daily temperature checks and limited contact before traveling to Japan. Athletes will have to undergo several COVID-19 tests before arrival and during the Games, as those who test positive will have to isolate and identify their close contacts.

The committee also recommended wearing masks at all times, except while eating, drinking, training, competing or sleeping.

The Tokyo Olympics will also look different from previous competitions in other respects, with spectators not attending and the winning athletes putting their medals around their necks to avoid spreading the virus.

However, even with precautions, athletes have already tested positive for COVID-19. American tennis player Coco Gauff and basketball player Katie Lou Samuelson will miss the games after contracting the virus.

Kara Ecker, a substitute on the US women’s gymnastics team, also tested positive for the virus, sending her and teammate Lian Wong into quarantine. Since then, the team has moved to stay in a hotel rather than the Olympic Village, a coach confirmed on Twitter.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research Policy at the University of Minnesota, co-authored a research paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that advocated a risk management approach to game planning.

“We realized that they were missing elements of the plan that were critical to trying to reduce the impact of COVID on the Olympics,” he said.

Osterholm told The Hill that he believes there are still “significant gaps” in the IOC’s current prevention plans, referring specifically to the lack of risk assessments for every venue and sport.

“At this point, they are being held captive, so all we can do is try to do our best to limit transmission,” he said.

Committee Chairman Toshiro Muto said on Tuesday that the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee had not ruled out the option of closing the Games if cases increased.

But Tara Kirk Seal, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said, “Saying no is not the only risk mitigation measure we have in our toolbox these days.”

“There are a lot of things that we have learned over the past year about transmission, about how to control disease, and we also have a great vaccine that has really changed the game,” she said.

IOC President Thomas Bach said last week that 85 percent of athletes and officials living in the Olympic Village have received a full vaccination, and that nearly all IOC members and staff are “immunized or immunized”.

But Japan’s vaccination rate is lower, with about 22 percent of the population fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, Tokyo began its fourth state of emergency this month amid a domestic and global surge in COVID-19 cases and the spread of the highly contagious delta variant.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the Washington Post Live Monday that he believes “everyone is concerned” that the Olympics could turn into a super-spreading event, noting that vaccines are “the best way to protect against this turning into something worse.” .

“But obviously, this has to be monitored very carefully,” he said.

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“Our team will follow very strict safety and health protocols, limiting interaction with the public, and keeping our footprint as small as possible,” she said. “The White House COVID team as well as IOC health officials and the government of Japan all agree that the strict health protocols and procedures in place will help keep our delegation safe.”

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