The blows continue to rain down on those who are now nicknamed “the Pandemic Games”. Scheduled from July 23 to August 8, the Tokyo Olympics will take place mainly behind closed doors, in the face of the resurgence of the coronavirus in Japan. The capital reported 920 new infections on Wednesday – up from 714 last week. “We have agreed that there will be no spectators at the venues in Tokyo,” Olympics Minister Tamayo Marukawa said after a meeting with all stakeholders at the Tokyo Olympics. Olympic Games, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Most of the Olympic venues are located in the Japanese capital. The competitions taking place in three neighboring departments (Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa) will also be closed to the public, the organizers later specified. Events planned in other departments, including Fukushima and Miyagi (northeast) or Shizuoka (center) will accept spectators, but on a limited basis. Nothing was spared at these Tokyo Olympics: from their postponement for a year last year to the renunciation in March of this year of spectators coming from abroad, an unprecedented decision in the history of the Olympic Games there too.
These announcements come a few hours after the decision of the Japanese government to reinstate a state of health emergency in Tokyo from Monday until August 22, a device which will thus encompass the entire period of the Olympic Games, while the city is currently listing about 900 cases of Covid-19 per day. “I think we can hold the Games safely with these measures,” Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said earlier today. “We need to strengthen measures to prevent infections from spreading again throughout Japan, given the impact of new variants,” added Yoshihide Suga, while the more contagious Delta variant would now account for around 30 % of cases in Japan.
“A heartbreaker”
“We will support all the measures which allow to have the Olympic and Paralympic Games in complete safety for the Japanese and for the participants”, had also explained at the beginning of the evening the president of the IOC Thomas Bach, arrived Thursday in Japan, but obliged to observe a three-day quarantine. Tokyo 2020 President Seiko Hashimoto said “The Tokyo Olympics should be a rare opportunity to feel the power of sport in stadiums full of fans. But we are facing an expansion of coronavirus cases. .It is extremely unfortunate that we are forced to organize this event in such a limited way.” She also added that she was “really sorry for the ticket holders and local residents who were looking forward to the matches.”
The governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, considered that this choice was “heartbreaking”, while calling on the public to follow the Games at home, “in a safe way”. A decision on the audience for the Paralympics (August 24-September 5) will be made after the Olympics, she said. In Japan, state of emergency measures are much less strict than the confinements imposed elsewhere in the world, consisting mainly of asking bars and restaurants to close earlier and limiting the number of spectators of sporting or cultural events. In June, the organizers of the Olympics decided to allow local spectators at 50% of a site’s capacity, with a ceiling of 10,000 people.
15% of the population fully vaccinated
But they had warned that these restrictions could be tightened, until behind closed doors, if the health situation worsened again in Japan. “The virus is definitely rebounding in Tokyo,” said Norio Ohmagari, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the National Center for Global Health and Medicine, in The Japan Times. Some 11,000 athletes are expected in Tokyo, where draconian anti-Covid measures have been imposed for all participants. While the Japanese archipelago has been relatively spared so far from the Covid-19 pandemic, with around 14,900 officially recorded deaths since the start of 2020, its vaccination program only accelerated from May. Particularly vaccinosceptic, Japan had decided to allow time before launching its vaccine campaign.
Just over 15% of the population has been fully vaccinated so far and experts fear the Delta variant could cause a new wave that could overwhelm hospitals in Japan, which has already experienced three states of emergency since the outbreak. last year. The Olympic Torch Relay, which has been banned on public roads in most of Japan, will also take place behind closed doors from Friday in the capital, where very limited ceremonies are planned instead until the Games . On Tuesday, the organizers of the Olympic Games had already announced that they would ask the public to “refrain” from attending the marathon and walking events, organized in Sapporo (northern Japan).
On the political level, these Olympic Games could be expensive for the Japanese Prime Minister who had insisted – despite the opposition of the public – to organize this competition. He had even gone against the recommendations made by the chief medical adviser, Shigeru Omi. The latter had said that the Olympics – combined with the summer holidays and the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant – could lead to an upsurge in infections. “The infections are in their expansion phase and everyone in this country needs to understand how serious this is,” Shigeru Omi told reporters on Wednesday. “The period from July to September is the most critical period for Japan’s Covid-19 measures,” he added.