Tokyo, Japan | XINHUA | The Ugandan Olympic team member who tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival in Japan has been confirmed to have infected with the Delta variant, Japan’s Olympic Minister Marukawa Tamayo said here on Friday.
The Ugandan man in his 50s, reportedly a coach in the nine-member delegation, tested positive after arriving at Tokyo’s Narita Airport on Saturday. Marukawa told reporters that he has been infected with the highly contagious Delta variant first detected in India.
The man has no symptoms, according to a health ministry official, but a second member tested positive for the virus after traveling to Izumisano City of Osaka Prefecture for a pre-Olympic training camp, Kyodo news agency said.
Two drivers and two attendants who were on the bus, as well as three city officials, have been designated as having had close contact with the infected team members.
The incident caused an immediate stir in Japan, where a majority of people polled by Japanese media are against the Olympics going ahead in its current format. Several media outlets also claim it proves the difficulty of creating a secure bubble for the Olympics.
But Tokyo Olympic chief Seiko Hashimoto played down concerns that the arrival of more overseas Olympians will increase the spread of infections.
“About 80 percent of the people are going to be vaccinated before arriving in our country,” she told reporters at a press conference. “We have to manage it even more diligently.”
“We have to learn from those examples,” she added.
“At the Tokyo Olympic Games, we cannot say everything is one hundred percent. We will make a bubble as close to one hundred percent as possible, and that will not be able to be done without getting support from all different stakeholders.”
Japanese infectious disease experts have warned that signs of another COVID-19 rebound in Tokyo are beginning to emerge only days after the capital’s state of emergency was lifted, the English-language Japan Times reported on Friday.
A total of 562 positive cases were confirmed in the Japanese capital on Friday. The figure is up 109 from a week earlier, marking a week-on-week increase of more than 100 for the third day in a row.
Hiroshi Nishiura, an epidemiologist at Kyoto University, said that the Delta variant could account for almost 70 percent of new cases across the country by July 23, the day of the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics.
The Delta variant also could account for half of all new cases in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area by early July, according to projections by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, the Japan Times said.
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