- Organizers announced in June that domestic fans would be allowed, despite concerns that the Games could be a superspreader event.
- A sudden rise in cases upended those plans.
- A state of emergency in Tokyo will run throughout the Games, to combat coronavirus.
The Olympic Games in Japan are to be held without spectators due to rising cases of coronavirus, reports BBC.
Olympics Minister Tamayo Marukawa made the announcement following discussions with officials and organisers on Thursday evening.
Spectators barred at Olympics
Olympic organizers said on Thursday that they would bar spectators from most events at the Games scheduled to open in two weeks, a decision that followed the declaration of a new state of emergency in Tokyo in response to a sudden spike in coronavirus cases.
Officials have long insisted that they can hold the Tokyo Games safely amid a pandemic. Last month, they announced that they would allow domestic spectators at the events despite public fears that the Games could become a petri dish for new variants of the virus.
Now, the virus has again wreaked havoc on the planning by Olympic organizers, who gathered in an emergency meeting on Thursday night to decide how to respond to the latest challenge of a pandemic that had already delayed the Games by a year.
The announcement came only hours before the Olympic torch was set to begin the last — and long-delayed — leg of its trip through Japan. Officials decided this week that there would be almost no actual running during its two-week perambulation through Tokyo and its suburbs, replacing the marathon with a series of ceremonies that would be closed to the public.
Delta variant on the rise
Addressing reporters on Thursday night, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga acknowledged the challenge the country faced as the more contagious Delta variant had begun to circulate. He warned about the danger of the virus spreading beyond Tokyo as people traveled home for the summer holidays.
But at the same time, Mr. Suga pledged to deliver an Olympic Games that would go down in history not as another victim of the pandemic, but as an example of fortitude in the face of adversity.
Viewers will be tuning in from around the world, he said, and “I want to transmit to them a message from Tokyo about overcoming hardship with effort and wisdom.”
The bar for achieving that goal moved even higher on Wednesday, when Tokyo reported 920 new coronavirus infections, the highest number since May, when the case count briefly rose over 1,000.
The state of emergency announced on Thursday will start on Monday and be in effect for the duration of the Olympics, which begin on July 23. It is the fourth time that Tokyo has been put under a state of emergency since the beginning of the pandemic.
The most recent one began in late April, and most restrictions were lifted by the end of June. Tokyo has since been under a quasi-emergency that was set to be lifted next Sunday.
New state of emergency
The impact of Covid-19 on Japan has been relatively mild compared to the effect on the rest of the world — a success that experts attribute to ubiquitous mask wearing, among other things. The death toll, at just over 14,800, is far lower than that of the United States, and Japan has never gone into the kinds of hard lockdowns seen in places like Australia and Singapore.
But Japan’s vaccine rollout — now at more than a million doses a day — got off to a slow start, and the country has struggled with persistent moderate levels of infection.
Polls increase to delay Olympics
Tokyo residents have taken each new state of emergency less seriously. Streets that were empty in June 2020 are now full of people going about their lives almost as normal — at least until evening, when bars and restaurants close early.
Still, the Japanese public has expressed widespread opposition as the Olympic organizers have proceeded with planning for the Games. Recent polls show that a large majority of people support canceling or further delaying the Olympics.
With each passing day, the possibility that the Games will be stopped becomes increasingly unlikely, regardless of the state of the virus outbreak in Tokyo. In a sign of the event’s inevitability, the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, arrived in Tokyo on Thursday. He had canceled a previous trip to Japan, scheduled for the spring, after the city entered a new state of emergency.
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Source: BBC
