Roughly 10,000 volunteers for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games have quit amid the nation’s struggle with COVID-19, with the games just a month and a half away, organizers revealed.
The 10,000 come from a group of 80,000 total unpaid volunteers, Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee officials told reporters on Wednesday. Toshiro Muto, the committee’s chief executive, said there was “no doubt” some of those individuals quit because of their concerns about the virus, according to the New York Times. However, the organizers have suggested several other reasons for the losses.
“We have not confirmed the individual reasons,” they said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. “In addition to concerns about the coronavirus infection, some dropped out because they found it would be difficult to actually work after checking their work shift, or due to changes in their own environment.”
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Muto said that the decreased number of volunteers will not affect the ability of the nation to host the games, which are scheduled to begin on July 23.
On Thursday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the organizers “need to respond carefully to volunteers as well as Japanese people in regards to concrete infection prevention measures,” according to the New York Times.
In late February, about 1,000 volunteers quit after Yoshiro Mori, who was then the organizing committee’s chairman, reportedly said “board meetings with lots of women take longer” during an Olympics board of trustees committee meeting.
In recent weeks, Japan has faced pressure from physicians and residents to scrap the games.
The Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, which represents about 6,000 primary-care physicians, recommended in a May open letter to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga that the games should be canceled due to the pandemic, according to Reuters.
In a survey conducted in Japan by news outlet Asahi Shimbun and released in mid-May, 83% of respondents said the games should be postponed or scrapped.
So far, the country has experienced 752,865 cases of COVID-19 and 13,220 deaths as a result of it, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Only 3% of the nation’s population has been fully vaccinated, trailing behind other developed countries.
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Despite the loss of volunteers and the country’s low vaccination rates, International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound said in late May that canceling the games is “essentially off the table.”
“None of the folks involved in the planning and the execution of the games is considering cancellation,” he told CNN.
The Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
