I ’m a Health Writer Who Covers the Olympics. Here’s What I Thought of the Tokyo Games Bubble

Over the past 18 months, I’ve written about the devastating impact of COVID-19 on hospitals, health care workers and families across the world. I’ve chronicled the efforts of drugmakers racing to formulate new treatments and vaccines to battle SARS-CoV-2. And I’ve tracked the ups and downs of public health policy that’s trying to keep up with a virus that makes it hard to develop clear rules on masking, social distancing and more. When well-intentioned mitigation measures are pitted against a wily virus, who wins? What would happen when tens of thousands of journalists, athletes and their support staff converge on a densely populated city like Tokyo, to put on something like the Olympics, which is about everything that pandemic policies are not? The Games are about bringing people together, literally and figuratively; keeping a fast-moving virus at bay is all about the opposite. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It was clear that infections would happen at the Olympics; it would just be a matter of picking them up as quickly as possible and isolating any positive cases before they spread to too many others. Japanese health authorities certainly instituted strict virus control measures, starting with the working assumption that every person arriving in Japan for the Olympics could be a potential virus carrier. That’s the first of many inconsistencies of these pandemic Olympics. Given that anywhere from 80% to 90% of the arriving journal...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized olympics Tokyo Olympics Source Type: news