The owners of Japan's 12 professional baseball teams held a meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday, at which they discussed a survey conducted at Yokohama Stadium and Tokyo Dome games where the number of spectators exceeded 50% of capacity and new technologies to prevent novel coronavirus infections had been installed on a trial basis.
A total of 4.82 million people attended 720 professional baseball games in the Central and Pacific leagues this season. Only two people were found to be infected with the coronavirus after attending, but health centers did not find any cases of close contact related to these two persons.
Three games from Oct. 30 at Yokohama Stadium and two from Nov. 7 at Tokyo Dome were each attended by more than half of their stadium's capacity for spectators. High-precision cameras and devices to detect electric waves from mobile phones were installed, and the density of carbon dioxide was measured, to make sure there were no problems resulting from capacities of more than 50%. A higher-than-usual percentage of spectators wore masks or had downloaded the government's contact-confirming COCOA app.
Nippon Professional Baseball Commissioner Atsushi Saito expressed his strong intention to attempt to raise the maximum acceptable percentage of spectators, which is currently set at 50% of stadium capacity.
"Fans take appropriate precautions when the number of spectators is increased," Saito said. "Based on scientific data, we want to take a positive stance on carrying out operations next year."
The meeting was chaired by Tomoko Namba, the owner of the Yokohama DeNA BayStars.
"There have been no major differences between 50 percent capacity and 86 percent capacity. There are no issues that we cannot overcome [to increase the number of spectators,]" Namba said. "We expect the data to be utilized in the management of professional baseball next season and the Tokyo Olympics [next year.]"
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