(ATR) The Olympic Village and a number of sports will be high risks to manage at the Tokyo Olympics says an epidemiologist with a background in sport.
Dr. Zachary Binney, a professor at Oxford College of Emory University spoke to Around the Rings about the dangers he sees for next year’s Olympics in Tokyo. Binney has written extensively about when U.S. professional sports leagues should consider cancelling their seasons.
The biggest challenge Binney said is the intrinsic difficulty in predicting the behavior of the Covid-19 virus.
"You can’t predict what this virus could do in two months," Binney said.
For the Olympics, Binney noted "it’s hard to draw a red-line for a go/no-go decision."
"The Olympics are a uniquely difficult and dangerous event to pull off," he told ATR.
"It depends on the time between cases, it depends on if you can connect the cases. If I saw five or six cases in the Olympic Village that spread in quick succession within the Olympic Village, that would alarm me very much.
"You need to do testing every day or at worst, every other day. Waiting for symptomatic cases to show up it’s already too late."
Merely having an Olympic Village is worrisome to Binney.
"Everyone is going to be at high risk from living in the Olympic Village. That is not an area where people limit their social contacts.
"In my mind the damage is already done once you’re there. The focus needs to be on stopping the virus getting into the Village."
Binney suggested Olympic Village social distancing strategies that would appear to be common sense, albeit likely logistically impossible. Multiple dining halls or setting times when teams could eat might be among those impractical solutions he says.
Binney says sexual contact could be another way for Covid-19 to spread in the Olympic village during the Games.
Binney says if the virus is suppressed enough in Japan "for several months" before the Olympics next July a limited number of spectators could attend events. But he says spectators should only be Japanese or other individuals who have resided in the country for a period of time.
Binney said "it makes no sense" for the IOC to cancel the Olympics now because of how unpredictable the Covid-19 virus has been.
"You would still have to make a decision very close to the event. You can’t predict what this virus would do in two months.
"Japan has done a substantially better job [than the United States]. If they can keep it under control for the next eight months or so, they can have some confidence."
Sports such as wrestling and handball, Binney believes, pose the highest risk for the disease to spread from competitor to competitor. Wrestling, judo, karate, tae kwon do and boxing are among other sports on the Tokyo program which involved extensive contact between competitors.
"I’m more worried about sports that have a lot of people in close contact for extended periods of time indoors--it’s just like everything else," he said.
Binney says team leaders from the world’s 206 NOCs have a duty to stay abreast on the coronavirus ahead of the Games.
"They certainly shouldn’t rely on the IOC for their sole source of information," he advised, urging them to also consult with their national health organizations.
Edited by Ed Hula.
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