JAPAN'S OLYMPIC PLAN FULL OF RISKY HOLES

If you find yourself believing that governments of all types have proven to be uniquely bad at learning from their mistakes over the course of a global pandemic, and of failing to make adjustments as new evidence is discovered, I give you the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee.

These are delicate times for the would-be Games of the XXXII Olympiad, with many of the conditions that were assumed to be achieved by punting them back a year having very much failed to materialize. Aggressive vaccination campaigns have allowed a small number of countries to wrestle COVID-19 under control, while others, Canada included, appear to be on a similar positive track. But positive cases have surged in much of South America, as well as parts of Africa and the Middle East, raising fears in Japan that they're poised to import a rash of infected people as travelling parties arrive for the Games. And Japan itself, which has largely avoided the various COVID surges that have been a public health disaster in other parts of the world, is dealing with a recent rise in positive cases while rolling out a slow vaccination campaign.

Not surprisingly, polling suggests a large majority of the Japanese public wants Tokyo 2020 scrapped, while medical groups, a leading newspaper (and Games sponsor) and some prominent citizens like billionaire businessman Masayoshi Son have called for a cancellation.

The head of a doctors' union said on Thursday that bringing thousands of people from around the world — the total number of visitors would be close to 25,000 — isn't something that has been attempted since the pandemic began more than a year ago.

“It's very difficult to predict what this could lead to,” he said, according to The Associated Press. There were warnings of possible new mutant strains, which is a phrase that would cause many to tug nervously at their collars.

The response from Tokyo 2020, the IOC, and the government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has been to insist that the Olympic environment will be “safe and secure.”

So far, two “playbooks” — documents that outline the procedures for visiting athletes and support staff, and a separate one for travelling media — have been released, with final versions of each expected next month.

They are, at the least, puzzling. The media playbook has some expected countermeasures: visitors must have proof of negative tests upon arrival to Japan, they will be tested again at the airport, and then will quarantine for three days and be tested daily during that time. Media members must also submit a twoweek “activity plan,” presumably for contact tracing purposes in the event of a positive test. They're also encouraged to limit interactions with those within Olympic facilities and essentially live within a Tokyo 2020 bubble. It will enforce this, as far as I can tell, via the honour system.

Elsewhere, it explains that access to Games venues will require temperature checks, and that facilities will have the highest of sanitation standards. There will be physical distancing requirements in places like press boxes and the normally bustling Main Press Centre, and masks will be required at all times.

If that seems like a paragraph that might have been written for a Games that was actually going to be held in 2020, that's because it might have been.

Temperature checks? Surface cleaning? Spacing out desks in an indoor facility? These are the infection control measures of more than a year ago, before it was learned that asymptomatic carriers were a risk and before it was clear that aerosol transmission indoors meant that being six feet away from someone was still risky if they were sharing the same air for a sustained period of time.

There is, meanwhile, no acknowledgment that outdoors is dramatically better than indoors, and no suggestion of, for example, outdoor dining areas. The playbook simply advises that people eat alone.

Not surprisingly, some experts are issuing warnings about this. The New England Journal of Medicine said this week that the Tokyo playbooks “are not built on scientifically rigorous risk assessment” and that they “fail to consider the ways in which exposure occurs” and “the factors that contribute to exposure.” Those sound like considerable oversights. The most likely explanation for Tokyo 2020's less-thanideal countermeasures is that an international event of this size requires some corners to be cut. Indoor facilities that were built with a hot Tokyo summer in mind can't all be turned into outdoor tents.

And while certain events over the course of the pandemic have created tight bubbles for participants, the sheer size of an Olympics that is taking place in the middle of a big city makes that impossible.

The best case for the organizers is that vaccination rates among visitors, and in Japan itself, are high enough by late July that the concerns of today will be much less of a problem.

As it stands, implicit in the playbooks is the hope that all Olympic visitors will follow the rules and take responsibility for keeping themselves and others safe.

A year-plus into this thing, that hasn't proven to be a winning strategy.