10,000 Volunteers Put Out Of The Upcoming Tokyo Olympics
Thousands of volunteers have left the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in recent weeks according to organizers. It fuels concerns that Japan may not be ready to host the rescheduled Games as the country struggles to rein in a new wave
of Covid-19 cases.
According to reports, about 10,000 of the 80,000 registered volunteers supporting athletic events had quit as of Wednesday, according to Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee officials.
Chief executive of the Organizing Committee, Toshiro Muto told Japanese media he does not believe the volunteer withdrawals will impact the operation of the Games, which were postponed last year due to the Covid pandemic.
The rescheduled event is due to start on July 23.
Volunteers are an instrumental part of the Summer Olympics. They help staff operate Olympic facilities and venues, and assist spectators and athletes. So if more continue to drop out, it could pose additional difficulties for organizers
However, no foreign spectators are allowed into Japan for the Games, so organizers may not need as many volunteers as other host cities have in years past.
Japan reported more than 752,000 total coronavirus cases and more than 13,200 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Daily new cases have been in the low thousands in recent days, declining from a fourth-wave peak of nearly 8,000 on April 29.
Japan’s vaccine rollout has also gone much slower than expected. While there is enough supply to vaccinate much of the country’s 126 million people, there is a bottleneck of medical professionals available to administer them. Only nurses, doctors, and dentists can legally give vaccines.
the authors wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine said, “We believe the IOC’s determination to proceed with the Olympic Games is not informed by the best scientific evidence. For us to connect safely, we believe urgent action is needed for these Olympic Games to proceed.”
Olympic organizers have maintained they’re confident the Olympics can be held safely and securely. Canceling the Olympics would be expensive for Japan as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), especially due to the loss of broadcasting revenues.
“All the stadiums are booked for other events already. It has been such hard work to postpone by one year … it is impossible to postpone it again,” Tokyo 2020 President Seiko Hashimoto told Nikkan Sports, a Japanese newspaper, in an interview published Thursday.
Dick Pound, the longest-serving IOC member, told CNN this week that “none of the folks involved in the planning and the execution of the Games is considering a cancellation.”
“That’s essentially off the table,” he said.
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