More than a year ago, Kara Eaker’s sister, U.S. Army Recruiting Command Surgeon Lt. Col. Katrina Walters, began providing COVID-19 prevention updates in her work role from Fort Knox.
The family followed her guidance and lead, it said last year. And indeed, Eaker said a few weeks ago that she was vaccinated when she spoke after she became one of two gymnasts hatched by the GAGE Center in Blue Springs to be named alternates to the U.S. Gymnastics team for the Tokyo Olympics.
So it seems a particularly perplexing and sad but revealing development that Eaker on Sunday tested positive for the coronavirus, sending her into isolation as the first known American athlete to test positive since arriving in Japan.
The news, revealed Monday, coincides closely with U.S. tennis player Coco Gauff announcing on Sunday that she would not be participating in the Olympics after testing positive for COVID-19 before leaving for Tokyo.
And much as we might all want to wish it away in our everyday lives and for what we’d like to be the proper resumption of this glorious global celebration, this, alas, will be the start of a distressing trend that will dominate the Games.
With opening ceremonies scheduled for Friday, it’s a prelude to the pandemic pandemonium ahead.
An event essentially deemed too big to fail, or at least to postpone again, is doomed to be defined by this chaos.
With the Summer Games already spectator-free as a safety precaution, now we’re left to wonder anew to what degree it will be athlete-deprived.
The tenuous USA gymnastics situation, with the alternates having traveled to Japan and practiced and otherwise been around the so-called starting six at a training site in Narita, Japan, makes for a fine microcosm of what’s bubbling around the Games.
Because also subject to what USAG in a statement called “additional quarantine restrictions” as a close contact is GAGE teammate Leanne Wong, who tested negative on Monday, per KSHB Channel 41, the local NBC/Olympics affiliate.
The Star could not immediately reach Al Fong, Eaker and Wong’s coach at GAGE, in Japan for comment or elaboration.
But he told KSHB that Wong had been placed in quarantine due to “briefly being in contact with Eaker,” as the station summed it up ... including at times in rooms together with masks off. It was not immediately clear from his description what that meant, since he pointed out that officials measured the distance from bed to bed in a room they apparently shared while adding that “they really rarely stayed together.”
Wong has not been vaccinated, she said after being named an alternate, a development that led to scrutiny of the entirely inadequate protocols in place as some 11,000 athletes from an estimated 205 countries converge on a city in a state of emergency in a country where only about 28% of the population had been vaccinated as of Monday morning.
Consider that the very way there is fraught with x-factors: Commercial flights are superspreaders waiting to happen, as seen in athletes on Kenya’s women’s team and South Africa’s men’s rugby 7’s team being diverted after at least one passenger on their flights tested positive for COVID-19 upon landing.
Between Sunday and Monday, a male Czech beach volleyball player and two South African men’s soccer players staying in the Olympic Village expected to be inhabited by 4,000 athletes also had tested positive, bringing to 60 what The Associated Press called Games-related infections since July 1.
Meanwhile, scores of positive tests lie ahead, enabled in part by the International Olympic Committee and sub-governing bodies not mandating vaccines but also relying on so-called “playbooks” that some experts have criticized as superficial.
The playbooks “are not built on scientifically rigorous risk assessment, and they fail to consider the ways in which exposure occurs, the factors that contribute to exposure, and which participants may be at highest risk,” Dr. Annie Sparrow wrote recently for the New England Journal of Medicine.
By way of example, she pointed to successful protocols in U.S.-based pro sports leagues such as the NFL, NBA and WNBA that were “rigorous and informed by an understanding of airborne transmission, asymptomatic spread, and the definition of close contacts.”
These contacts have been away from the fray, since the USAG team has not been staying in the Village, as noted Sunday by Simone Biles’ coach Cecile Landi on Twitter: We “know it isn’t ideal for the Olympic experience but nothing is ideal during a pandemic,” she wrote, attaching a crying face emoji and adding that “we feel like we can control the athletes and our safety better in a hotel setting!”
Unfortunately, whatever control they had hasn’t been enough ... despite USAG insisting that strict measures were in place including Japanese COVID chaperones overseeing delegation movements, the replacement contingent working out in separate groups during training at the same facility and sitting across the dining room from the regulars.
Still, there likely were ample other points of exposure among them all.
Eaker and Wong, along with the two other alternates (Kayla DiCello and Emma Malabuyo), traveled in the same bus as the rest of the team to training, for instance, albeit with the backup group and their coaches sitting in the rear of the bus while the regulars rode up front.
And while USAG said that all members wear masks at all times at the hotel, on the bus, and at the training facility unless they are in their room, eating or actively training, it wasn’t immediately clear if those standards were met or, of course, how Eaker came to test positive.
Nor is it yet certain what the implications are for the rest of the team. But USAG noted that an additional precaution has been added now: The main team and coaches will have their own rooms at the hotel where they’re staying. And they will be in a separate hotel that it said was previously planned for this stage.
“The entire delegation continues to be vigilant,” the USAG said in a statement, “and will maintain strict protocols while they are in Tokyo.”
Much as we hope we’re wrong, though, the protocols just don’t seem to be enough to make these Games do more good than harm.
Especially considering that even someone like Eaker, who had an ample early education in the virus and by all indications has taken it seriously from the start and been vaccinated, can test positive ... to say nothing of those who aren’t vaccinated or are otherwise reckless, and the sheer stealth of the virus.
