Tokyo Olympics – An Olympic Nightmare

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The situation is thus that in the host city for this summer’s Olympics, Tokyo, it is more than closed down, there is a state of emergency. Plans to reopen on May 11 have been postponed until further notice. The infection is out of control, and in a big city like Osaka, people die relatively more than in India, despite the fact that the hospital offer is something completely different in Japan than in India. During the first four months of this year, more corona deaths have occurred than in the whole of last year. In Tokyo and the surrounding municipalities, where many of the participants, the press and the support apparatus will live, the hospitals have been blown up. And it is soon only two months until July 23, when the games are scheduled to open. It will be a limited sports party, without visiting spectators.

To be a rich, industrial, and well-organized country, Japan has come a sensational short in the vaccination of the population. The country has obtained deliveries of 300 million doses of vaccine, but logistical chaos, late approval of the vaccines, and lack of people to inject, make it far behind the rest of the industrialized world in the vaccination program. Vaccination of five million health workers did not start until February, and only a third of these have been vaccinated. While the vaccination program for the population began in early April. Then they started vaccinating the most vulnerable, those over 65, and last week only 45,000 of the very oldest were fully vaccinated, in a country with 126 million inhabitants.

Everything therefore suggests that Japan will be a country in a still state of emergency when the games are scheduled to start. It will be a country preoccupied with completely different things than a big sports party. Conducting an Olympics with these scenery would be like being forced to receive quite startling intrusive guests. It will be as far from a formed company with good manners as it is possible to get. That’s the starting point.

In addition to that 80 percent of the Japanese ask for the Olympics to be postponed or canceled, so the health workers signed up in earnest in the debate on Tuesday. The Norwegian Medical Association urged the IOC to cancel the Games on the grounds that the health service has been blown up, and that it does not have the capacity to take care of visitors to an Olympics. Eight other organizations associated with the health service joined the prayer.

The prayer is properly addressed. For the IOC who owns the toys, and basically alone decides whether they should go their separate ways. War and civil war are reasons to postpone the Olympics, as it was once during World War I, and twice during World War II. In addition, there is a wording that things that endanger the safety of the participants may be a reason to cancel or postpone the games.

Pandemic and disease is unploughed legal mark. Should the Japanese government be pressured to cancel the Games in violation of the IOC, it is in principle the host, Tokyo, that will compensate the IOC’s expected loss of revenue. But legal experts tell the BBC that both parties are insured, so it will probably be insurance companies that will eventually take the settlement.

It will be a big one loss of prestige for the IOC to postpone or cancel this summer’s Olympics. Last year, due to corona, it was postponed until this year, and the IOC has invested heavily in implementing this year’s toys. In Japan, the threshold is high for being directly dismissive of strangers or guests. You do not directly say no to a guest’s wishes. It is a Japanese ideal of formation. There is now reason to call for a similar ideal of formation with the IOC. Namely that you do not need to be a guest, in a situation where you know that you are not welcome.

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