Maybe COVID-19 will get the gold for a knockout even before the Summer Olympiad begins on Friday. Nearly sixty people associated with the Olympiad have had to quarantine after testing positive for the virus just days after 15,000 people arrived in Tokyo. The entire event threatens to become a superspreader, especially when athletes begin returning to their home countries.

Remind me again … who thought this was a good idea?

Tokyo 2020 reported Monday that there are 58 Covid-19 cases linked to the Olympic Games so far.https://t.co/u4gFMTeRba pic.twitter.com/93ZHQDnkhM

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) July 19, 2021

Tokyo 2020 reported Monday that there are 58 Covid-19 cases linked to the Olympic Games so far.

Early Monday, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee confirmed that an alternate on the women’s artistic gymnastics team tested positive for Covid-19.

She tested positive on Sunday and her doctor confirmed the test result after another test Monday. The unidentified athlete has been transferred to a hotel to quarantine.

On Sunday, three members from South Africa’s Olympic soccer team — two players and an official — became the first people to test positive for Covid-19 after arriving at the Tokyo Olympic Village, according to the South African Football Association. The whole team is now under quarantine “until cleared to train,” according to the the association said.

Several prominent athletes have also dropped out of the Games. American tennis star Coco Gauff tested positive for the virus and is unable to participate in the Games.

In some ways, this reminds me of the Zika outbreak in Brazil during the 2016 Olympics, with one key distinction. Zika is a mosquito-borne virus which doesn’t spread through direct human contact. Eliminate the mosquitoes and you eliminate the transmission risk, and that strategy appeared to work five years ago. With COVID-19, and especially with the now-dominant Delta variant, the virus transmits rapidly through dense human populations. The only way to eliminate the risk is to eliminate the humans by canceling the dense-population events where possible until vaccines render the virus an annoyance at worst.

The alternative is the protocols that the IOC put in place to make the games “a COVID-safe environment,” which USA Today dryly notes are getting tested already:

“These are the strict guidelines we are putting in place as we work closely with the IOC, experts and relevant authorities,” Takaya said. “With these measures, we’ll see if the South African team will be able to participate.”

In the case of the other athlete who tested positive in the Olympic Village – Czech beach volleyball player Ondřej Perušič – the country’s Olympic committee said in a statement that it is exploring the possible postponement of Perušič’s opening match, scheduled for July 26.

The positive tests among athletes have stoked fears of a possible outbreak in the Olympic Village, which would be the nightmare scenario for organizers.

The IOC and Tokyo 2020 have each sought to reassure athletes that the Olympic Village is safe and secure. IOC executive director Christophe Dubi stressed the difference between “a COVID safe environment” and one that is “COVID free.”

“I don’t think we can ever say COVID-free,” Dubi said.

That sounds good in theory, but in practice it has undermined the raison d’etre of the Olympiad. Top athletes who test positive have had to bow out, and as more of that occurs, the competition becomes less meaningful to spectators and fans. With the Delta variant as virulent as it is, we can expect more positives and more dropouts to come, too.

That has consequences not just for the athletes, but also for the host country and the countries around the world that have sent athletes and staff to Tokyo. In Japan, no one’s buying the IOC’s insistence of “zero” risk of becoming a superspreader:

While Olympics officials said there was “zero” chance of the Games triggering a super-spreader event, most Japanese haven’t bought that line. Two separate news polls over the weekend showed that an overwhelming majority of residents remained skeptical that the Games could be held safely.

Outside the village, the sprawling city of almost 14 million faces its own surge. Tokyo saw five consecutive days with more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases until they finally dipped again on Monday. The weekly average of new cases jumped more than 45% last week.

All of this raises a question: why not just wait until next year to hold the Olympics? It got postponed last year in the first wave of the pandemic when the dominant virus was the original SARS-Co-19 variant rather than the more transmissible Delta variant. By next year, we can expect much better vaccination levels worldwide and especially in Japan. If the Olympiad could survive a delay, why not delay it until better preparation could prevent the kind of issues these games have already seen — before the games even begin?