(ATR) The efficacy of Japan’s Olympian entry requirements remains to be seen.
On Tuesday, Japanese Olympics Minister Seiko Hashimoto said the government may allow entry for Olympians coming from countries with little control over the Covid-19 outbreak.
In an email to Around the Rings, Dr. Zachary Binney, a sports-focused epidemiologist with Oxford College at Emory University says it "far too early" to know if this decision will be sound.
After largely containing the outbreak new cases in Japan have surged in July to nearly half the number at the April 12 peak.
However, the novel coronavirus has continued to confound researchers.
"There's no way to know right now what Japan or any other country will look like in May 2021," Binney said.
In his first interview with ATR, Binney made the same overarching statement: Covid-19 is too unpredictable to say anything authoritative about what may happen during the Tokyo Olympics next year.
Should Japanese authorities permit travel, Olympians and their entourage would need a standard 14-day quarantine either before leaving their home country or outside of the Olympic Village, Binney said.
However, the safest option, according to Binney, is still restricting travel from countries with widespread community transmission.
"But how many athletes would that mean excluding?" Binney posited. "I can understand the organizers wanting to keep that to a minimum. Quarantining delegations pre- or post-travel seems like a compromise solution."
While the exact details are yet to be finalized, Binney noted there is lots of time to come up with an acceptable plan.
"Home country quarantines would require placing a great deal of trust in national committees to correctly construct and strictly enforce them, but it's theoretically doable.
"If, for example, you put the American delegation in a bubble for 14 days before traveling and everybody tested negative throughout that process, then I think they could pretty safely travel to Japan and enter the Olympic Village."
Homepage photo: Wikimedia Commons
For general comments or questions,click here.
Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.
Recent Articles
Sinner-Alcaraz, the duel that came to succeed the three phenomenons
Beyond the final result, Roland Garros left the feeling that the Italian and the Spaniard will shape the great duel that came to help us through the duel for the end of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era.
Table tennis: Brazil’s Bruna Costa Alexandre will be Olympic and Paralympic in Paris 2024
She is the third in her sport and the seventh athlete to achieve it in the same edition; in Santiago 2023 she was the first athlete with disabilities to compete at the Pan American level and won a medal.
Rugby 7s: the best player of 2023 would only play the medal match in Paris
Argentinian Rodrigo Isgró received a five-game suspension for an indiscipline in the circuit’s decisive clash that would exclude him until the final or the bronze match; the Federation will seek to make the appeal successful.
Rhonex Kipruto, owner of the world record for the 10000 meters on the road, was suspended for six years
The Kenyan received the maximum sanction for irregularities in his biological passport and the Court considered that he was part of a system of “deliberate and sophisticated doping” to improve his performance. He will lose his record and the bronze medal at the Doha World Cup.
Katie Ledecky spoke about doping Chinese swimmers: “It’s difficult to go to Paris knowing that we’re going to compete with some of these athletes”
The American, a seven-time Olympic champion, referred to the case of the 23 positive controls before the Tokyo Games that were announced a few weeks ago and shook the swimming world. “I think our faith in some of the systems is at an all-time low,” he said.
