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Tokyo officials took a calculated risk in hosting the Olympic Games last July and August. While infections of the Delta variant were causing surges around the world, including in the host city, Japanese Olympic and government authorities felt that proper control measures, including vaccination, masking, testing, and isolation would quell any outbreaks and keep the world’s largest sporting event from becoming a super spreader conflagration.
That bet proved to be mostly right, according to recently published data in a Research Letter in JAMA. What it means for the just-started 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, which have begun as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, will become clear as the Games play out over the next month.
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The study, by members of the Bureau of International Health Cooperation, the National Center for Global Health and Medicine Tokyo, the Infectious Diseases Control Center and Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, focused on athletes, coaches, and support staff during both the Olympic and Paralympic Games who stayed in the Olympic Village. All were required to test negative twice in the days before boarding their flights to Tokyo, and were tested with a saliva test upon arriving at the airport. While in the Village, athletes, coaches, and support staff were tested daily.
Health officials at the airport conducted 54,520 SARS-CoV-2 saliva tests, and 55 people tested positive, which was confirmed by an additional PCR test using a nasopharyngeal swab. These individuals were isolated in a designated facility until they tested negative.
Read more: I’m a Health Writer Who Covers the Olympics. Here’s What I Thought of the Tokyo Games Bubble
Among the more than one million daily tests conducted during both the Olympics and Paralympics, 299 were confirmed positive, leading to a positive rate of 0.03%. Based on these positive tests, 3,426 additional PCR tests…
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Source : time
