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| Above, the Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
The Olympic Games in Tokyo will go on, but largely because the Japanese government botched getting the coronavirus under control with an effective vaccination program, there will be no spectators.
Reuters reported:
TOKYO, July 9 (Reuters) - A Japanese official choked up with tears on Friday as he apologised for the cancellation of Olympic tickets, a moment that crystallised the country's pain at seeing the Tokyo 2020 Games overshadowed by a worsening COVID-19 pandemic.
The display of emotion from Hidenori Suzuki, the official in charge of ticket sales for Tokyo 2020, came a day after organisers bowed to political pressure and rising infections in the capital, barring almost all fans from the Games just two weeks before they are due to start.
Two visiting Olympic delegation members tested positive for COVID-19, media said on Friday, in a reminder of the risk as infections rise in the capital.
In hindsight, instead of postponing the Olympics a year, Japan probably should have cut its losses and canceled them last year.
It is going to be a long time before Japan can open up its borders again for tourism.
To read more, go here.
1 comment:
It pretty hard to draw conclusions about what strategy works best. You mention that the Japanese government did not do an effective job vaccinating its population, and this may be true. The question is, would it have made any difference? Great Britain has a very aggressive vaccination program, and I think is around 60% fully vaccinated, yet the number of new cases has progressively risen from fewer than 3000 per day to more than 30,000 per day in the past month. That's more than 10 times as many as Japan, but the UK has only slightly more than half Japan's population. Another example is Israel, with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. But they, too, are on the rise, and on a per capita basis, have almost double the cases every day as does Japan. There seems to be no "correct" strategy, and as usual, anything government does only makes things worse. (Violates rights, reduces freedom, wrecks jobs, lives and the economy, causes higher rates of suicide, etc.) I think Japan is stupid to cancel the spectators' tickets. I'll be there are about as many people at a Trump rally as at an Olympic venue. And did you see all the people at UFC where Trump got a hero's welcome the other night? Governments should just go F themselves and let people decide how to look after their own health.
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