The Tokyo Olympics has registered its first coronavirus cluster, as a Greek swimming team was forced to withdraw after being overwhelmed by infection.
The entire Greek artistic swimming squad has been eliminated from the Games after four swimmers and an official tested positive. Seven other members of the team who tested negative have been placed in isolation.
The Greeks were among 29 new cases reported today in people involved with the Olympics, raising the total number of such cases to more than 300. One was a foreign athlete from an unidentified country, four were volunteers and the rest were contractors and officials.
“It is a cluster,” Masanori Takaya, spokesman for the Tokyo organising committee, said.
“We proposed to the Greek [national Olympic committee] that the seven [who tested negative] should immediately be transferred to a holding facility and they accepted. All seven were moved out of the village yesterday.
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“Their artistic swimmers did not compete in duet events and they are also no longer eligible to participate in the team event. We wish them a speedy recovery.”
Meanwhile, the head of the Japanese government’s expert panel on the pandemic said that holding the Olympics had undermined the willingness of people in Tokyo to follow the restrictions of the country’s continuing state of emergency, which is being widely ignored despite surging infection figures.
Shigeru Omi said: “I don’t think that the infections [of people involved in the Games] under the ‘bubble system’ are directly related to the rapid spread of infections at all. But I think that the fact that the Olympics are being held has had an impact on people’s awareness. The message from political leaders was not united, strong and clear.”
There were 14,207 new cases nationwide reported in Japan yesterday, 4,166 of them in Tokyo — both daily records.
