After a year-long delay, 18 months of perpetual crisis and bitter controversy at every turn, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has finally begun.
But with just two days to go until the opening ceremony and with events already underway (Sweden’s women’s football team thrashed the US 3-0 today), the threat of cancellation still looms large.
The host city, Tokyo, is in a state of emergency because of surging cases of coronavirus. While Japan’s vaccine drive is starting to gain steam, just seven per cent of its citizens are fully immunised. The country’s relative scarcity of Covid cases (around 850,000 in total compared to the UK’s 5.5 million) means there are lower levels of natural immunity in the population.
