Opinion | Tokyo insists otherwise, but it’s hard to see how the Olympics can go on unaffected by coronavirus

There is probably no population on the planet better prepared for an infectious disease outbreak than Japan’s. While Londoners, Parisians and New Yorkers try substituting awkward elbow bumps for handshakes and struggle with unaccustomed masks, the Japanese have not only been bowing from a distance since time immemorial and wearing face masks regularly, but they also use mouthwash and hand sanitiser the moment they reach home in the wintertime and always remove footwear inside the home.

Yet this prodigious and time-tested ability to handle scourges like the coronavirus coexists awkwardly with the imperative to be warm, gracious, and magnanimous hosts to millions of visitors for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. Come July, barring any dramatic changes to the world’s biggest and most resplendent sporting pageant, visitors from scores of different nations will descend on Japan’s teeming capital, where they will share narrow hotel lifts and corridors, pack into crowded buses and subway cars, pour into restaurants and ramen shops, and sit cheek by jowl in intimate stadium seating and other Olympic venues.

The Japanese government maintains that its countermeasures against coronavirus are up to the challenge but then it rolled out a tangled Olympic welcome mat with its clumsy handling of the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak in February.

Local officials resisted transferring close contacts of infected passengers into onshore quarantine facilities in Yokohama, preferring instead to keep the coronavirus away from their own population while consigning thousands of passengers to a nightmarish shambles of a quarantine, restricting them mostly to their cabins while the virus circulated in ideal confined conditions.