The COVID-19 Lambda Variant
August 5, 2021
Can We See The End Of The Pandemics Road?
August 10, 2021The Olympic Games were delayed last year due to COVID-19, and just wrapped up the final events yesterday, August 8. The IOC received a lot of backlash from residents of Japan for allowing to let the Olympics go on even with the countries low vaccination rate. Japan was sitting around 20% vaccination rate during the start of the Olympics, and right as athletes and workers started showing up, Japan saw a spike in COVID cases, and saw the most cases in one day since January. With more released about the Delta variant, this is not surprising. It can still be contracted by fully vaccinated people, and was by plenty of athletes. Many athletes were also dismissed from the games after testing positive multiple times, but showing no symptoms.
https://www.britannica.com/list/7-significant-political-events-at-the-olympic-games
The Olympic Games were delayed last year due to COVID-19, and just wrapped up the final events yesterday, August 8. The IOC received a lot of backlash from residents of Japan for allowing to let the Olympics go on even with the countries low vaccination rate. Japan was sitting around 20% vaccination rate during the start of the Olympics, and right as athletes and workers started showing up, Japan saw a spike in COVID cases, and saw the most cases in one day since January. With more released about the Delta variant, this is not surprising. It can still be contracted by fully vaccinated people, and was by plenty of athletes. Many athletes were also dismissed from the games after testing positive multiple times, but showing no symptoms.
During the games there were 464 positive cases with some connection to the Olympics, as according to the Olympics website. Although this number isn’t huge, a big part of cases can most likely be connected to the “bubble” that was “popped” in an effort to minimize COVID as much as possible. Essentially, the thought of the bubble was to allow athletes, family members, workers, and viewers to stay within a bubble of places and they were not supposed to leave this specific area. This was an effort to mimic the NBA’s bubble that seemed to work fairly well for them, but for the Olympics, this didn’t quite work out and Japan saw a surge in daily cases. It happened roughly around the same time as the Delta variant started picking up speed, so it’s not to say this wouldn’t have happened without the Olympics, but the Olympics surely didn’t help out.
Now that the Olympics is over, Japan will make a push to recover from the damage that the games did. There may be measures taken to try and vaccinate more people of Japan to minimize the severity and likelihood of contracting COVID.
As a wrap up, Team USA finished first medal count, as well as gold count. Congrats to all the athletes that competed on the highest stage, now it's time to figure out how to end COVID.
