Welcome to the Tokyo Olympics, where public health, money and politics collide

It’s night when the Olympic torch arrives on the streets of Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture. Viral video the slow walk of the flashlight carrier is shown to the spectators on the road. Then, as the flame passes, a woman in the crowd shoots a water pistol.

“Turn off the Olympic flame! Against the Tokyo Olympics! ”. he shouts. Security is running around him.

This is the backdrop for the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games, which will begin in Tokyo on July 23 – 19 cases of cowardice are on the rise – and will announce the city’s fourth state of emergency since the pandemic began. The average growth rate is worrying as the country’s vaccination rate remains low. Only 18% of the Japanese population is fully vaccinated.

However, the International Olympic Committee is making progress. They are in play billions of dollars in sunken costsTokyo Olympic Stadium it cost $ 1.4 billion alone billions more IOC, Japan, in potential revenue for local organizers and disseminators.

The healthy global crisis ended, a huge amount of money and the government began to return the bet: the forces that clash in Tokyo are unprecedented. Although the new rules on gambling are drastic, experts are concerned that 19 may worsen in Japan.

Keeping athletes safe

Nearly 100,000 athletes, staff and family members and others are expected to enter Japan for the Olympics and Paralympic Games, and organizers said they are making every effort to ensure safety.

Brian McCloskey, chairman of an independent panel advising the IOC on covid-19 mitigation measures in Tokyo, acknowledges concerns. To reduce the risk of the virus spreading, athletes, staff and others will be monitored, he says.

“The goal is not to have a Tokyo coronavirus,” McCloskey says. “The goal is to cluster these individual cases and spread the facts.”

Athletes, staff and officials will perform tests during the games. It will be tested daily by residents of the Olympic country, for example, it will be tested more often by Japanese workers who have a close relationship with athletes than those who direct traffic. McCloskey says the contact tracing system will be used to help pick up cases that arise in the Olympic Village. Anyone entering Japan will need to download the contact tracking app, and athletes and media members will be asked to turn on GPS tracking on their phones. Organizers say location data will only be used if there are hidden cases.

As the games get closer the measures become more stringent. Audience members from other countries were banned a month ago, and earlier this month it was announced that there would be no spectators in and around Tokyo.

McCloskey said there are precedents for making games a threat to public health, even if the former were not on the same level as the scales. When he advised the IOC for the 2012 London Olympics, he says organizers were looking into the possibility of a SARS pandemic. Zikari (WHO) was concerned before the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil he said later no cases were reported in athletes or spectators).

For Tokyo, the COI has released “playbooks” of instructions for athletes, staff, volunteers and the press.

But despite the strict rules, games would inevitably lead to people getting confused and interacting, in ways that would not otherwise happen.

“It’s not just the event itself,” says Linsey Marr, a civil engineering and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who is a leading expert on airborne virus transmission. “It’s everything else related to the event: hotels, restaurants, transportation.”