Olympics’ pandemic playbook put to the test

WHEN I first told my medical colleagues that I would be travelling 14 hours to Tokyo, they looked at me with a bit of surprise, then hesitantly told me simply to “be safe.”

It is the same reaction I have often received when jetting off to cover a natural disaster, like the earthquake in Haiti, or a conflict, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This time, however, the mission was to report on how people from all over the globe would converge for the Olympic Games in a city under a state of emergency due to the pandemic.