COVID Is Slowly Tearing Apart The Olympics

As reported last week, there were some questions if the Olympics would resume this year as normal after last years delay due to COVID-19. The CEO of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan has not counted out a last minute cancellation of the Olympics due to the surge in cases in Japan, their low vaccination rate, and some of the top athletes have been pulled from the games due to health and safety protocols surrounding COVID-19. Japan has seen the highest amount of cases per day in about the last week, since January. Japan is also only about 20% vaccinated, and the effort they made to create a bubble to keep as many visitors and athletes safe as possible, but the bubble has not been very successful. The Olympics are doing daily testing on the athletes, and so far there have been over 70 confirmed cases among the 11,000 athletes, but the cases are rising within the athletes.

We have seen athletes withdrawal from the games due to positive COVID tests, and now we have seen an entire team pull out of the games due to COVID concerns. That team is Guinea which is located in Africa. Yahoo Sports states, “Guinea was set to send five athletes to Tokyo — freestyle wrestler Fatoumata Yarie Camara, swimmers Mamadou Tahirou Bah and Fatoumata Lamarana Toure, runner Aissata Deen Conte and judo competitor Mamadou Samba Bah.” The team is concerned with the health and safety of their athletes, and have determined this was in the best interest of the athletes, pulling the team out of the Olympics right before the opening ceremony. It’ll be interesting to see if other teams follow suite not that the door has been opened.

Many teams are facing at least one COVID case. If more and more athletes keep testing positive and losing some of their top athletes, then I think there may be a few more teams that extract from the Olympics, at least there is a fair shot.

If Japan’s cases also continue to increase, the CEO will have to make a tough decision. It’s unlikely that they would push the games back another year to prevent the Winter and Summer Olympics from being back to back.

The people of Japan are generally not satisfied with the idea that the Olympics are being held and endangering the community. Yahoo Sports states, “Japan is averaging more than 3,500 new cases each day as of Thursday, according to The New York Times, which is about a 112% increase over the past two weeks.” The Olympics are a huge economic booster for the home country and I think that is a big motivation to let the games go on. It will be interesting to see how the next few days unfold.