(CALHOUN, Ga.) — A Georgia family is mourning the loss of their 5-year-old son who they say died after contracting COVID-19.
Wyatt Gibson, 5, died on July 16 after suffering a stroke, according to a statement written by his grandmother, Andrea Mitchell, and shared with ABC News.
Mitchell described Wyatt, of Calhoun, Georgia, as a “typical healthy, happy boy” who became sick last week with what the family originally thought was food poisoning.
After two days of symptoms, including vomiting, no appetite and lethargy, Wyatt’s parents took him to a local hospital. He was then transferred to a children’s hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was diagnosed with strep and staph infections and COVID-19, according to Mitchell. Viral respiratory infection, such as COVID-19, can pre-dispose a person to secondary bacterial infections such as bacterial pneumonia or meningitis.
Days later, Wyatt suffered a stroke and died, according to Mitchell. It is unclear which infection caused the stroke. The official cause of death is unknown and hospital officials declined to comment citing federal privacy laws.
“All we know is a bright light has left. He left rainbows everywhere for us to see. We’ll be constantly reminded, saddened, then maybe in time, make peace with it,” she wrote. “For there was so much life in this 5-year-old boy. So much joy. So maybe it’s not the quantity of life that we will miss. But the quality of life. That was pure bliss.”
Wyatt’s father, Wes Gibson, was also diagnosed with COVID-19 at the same time as his son, according to Mitchell. It is unclear whether any of Wyatt’s family members were fully vaccinated.
Gibson, a local law enforcement officer, and his wife Alexis, who also share a daughter, declined to be interviewed.
The number of young children diagnosed with COVID-19 is also increasing. There were more than 23,000 new pediatric cases diagnosed in the U.S. last week, twice as many as the end of June, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
Children under the age of 12 are currently not eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. Public health experts have stressed the importance of parents and caregivers being fully vaccinated to help protect those who are not yet eligible for the vaccine.
People who are fully vaccinated, a term used to describe a person two weeks after their last shot, are still considered safe from serious illness or death, even if they are exposed to the delta variant, which is quickly becoming the dominant variant spread in the U.S.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 99.5% of hospitalizations are people who weren’t immunized.
(IOWA) — Democrat Abby Finkenauer, a one-term congresswoman who represented Iowa’s 1st Congressional District until she was unseated by a Republican in 2020, announced Thursday she’s running for Senate.
In her announcement video, Finkenauer, who is also a former state representative, shares the news with an intimate group of Iowans, calling out longtime fixtures of the Senate for how “obsessed” they are with maintaining power, citing their response to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“The politicians who’ve been there for decades … [t]hey think they own democracy, and they were silent when it was attacked. You see it’s politicians like Senator Grassley and Mitch McConnell, who should know better, but are so obsessed with power that they oppose anything that moves us forward. Since the Capitol was attacked, they’ve turned their backs on democracy, and on us,” she says. “They made their choice, and I’m making mine. I’m running for the United States Senate.”
The seat Finkenauer is seeking has been held by Republican Chuck Grassley for 40 years. First elected in 1980 when Republican Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House and defeating incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, Grassley is the longest serving senator to ever represent the Hawkeye State.
The 87-year-old has been fundraising, earning nearly $2 million in contributions so far this cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission filing for his campaign committee submitted a week ago. But Grassley has not made his reelection bid official yet, despite the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s chairman persistently “bugging” the senator to make an announcement.
However, Sen. Rick Scott, the NRSC’s chairman, indicated in a podcast interview Tuesday he feels good about Grassley seeking another term, citing a fundraiser he recently held for him in Florida.
“If he flies all the way from Iowa down to Naples, Florida, I think he’s gonna run,” Scott said.
The Republican Party of Iowa was quick to blast Finkenauer after her announcement.
“Let me be as clear as possible – Abby Finkenauer will never represent the state of Iowa in the U.S. Senate,” Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said in a statement. “Iowans know Finkenauer and her disastrous record, it’s why they rejected her last November. No matter how she tries to reinvent herself, Iowans will see that her values and priorities are just the same as AOC’s and Chuck Schumer’s. Finkenauer will fall in line with Democrat leadership every chance she gets in hopes to gain media notoriety. … I look forward to seeing even more Iowans reject Finkenauer once again.”
When Finkenauer won in 2018, she became one of the youngest members of Congress along with New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At only 32 years old, Grassley was already serving his second Senate term when she was born.
After flipping her district from red to blue in the 2018 blue wave, the Democrat narrowly lost reelection in 2020 to Republican Ashley Hinson. Hinson won about 10,700 more votes than Finkenauer, giving her a 2.6-point lead over Finkenauer. Across the country in 2020, Republicans picked up 14 seats, not including Republican-turned independent Justin Amash’s district, giving Democrats the slimmest House majority since the early 2000s.
Based on the 2020 election, Democrats are facing an uphill battle to win statewide in Iowa. The Republican in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, also won her election, flipping an open seat from blue to red as well. Republican Joni Ernst fended off a challenge from Democrat Theresa Greenfield, winning reelection by a 6.6-point margin. Former President Donald Trump’s margin against President Joe Biden was even bigger, 8.2 points.
But if Grassley chooses to forgo a bid, an open race could be much more competitive.
(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot back at House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday and said the Jan. 6 select committee is “deadly serious” after McCarthy accused Pelosi of an “egregious abuse of power.”
“It’s my responsibility as speaker of the House, to make sure we get to the truth on this, and we will not let their antics stand in the way of that,” she said at her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill.
The boiling tensions between the two come after Pelosi rejected two of McCarthy’s nominees for the committee — Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks — citing concerns with “statements made and actions taken by these members” that might compromise the integrity of the investigation. Jordan and Banks are vocal allies of former President Donald Trump and supported his efforts to overturn the election.
“It’s bipartisan, and we have a quorum. Staff is being hired to do the job,” Pelosi continued. “We’re there to get the truth, not to get Trump.”
While Pelosi accepted McCarthy’s other three picks — Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, North Dakota Rep. Kelly Armstrong and Texas Rep. Troy Nehls — McCarthy threatened Wednesday to pull all of his members.
“Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts,” McCarthy said at a press conference on the Hill.
Pelosi acknowledged at her press conference that Nehls had also voted against certifying election results for President Joe Biden, but said the two members she rejected, Jordan and Banks, had taken the big lie to another level.
“The other two made statements and took actions that just made it ridiculous to put them on such a committee seeking the truth,” she said.
She said some counseled her to allow Jordan and Banks on the committee “and then when they act up you can take them off,” she disclosed. “I said, ‘why should we waste time on something so predictable?'”
“I’m not going to spend any more time talking about them,” she added later.
Back in May, Senate Republicans killed a proposal for an independent, bipartisan commission that would have given Republicans equal representation to investigate the Capitol attack. Under the House select committee proposal, which was approved by the House mostly along party lines with GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger or Illinois joining Democrats, Pelosi gets seven appointments and McCarthy has five.
Pelosi also maintained the power to reject McCarthy’s appointments, which she exercised Wednesday.
The House Select Committee was expected to hold its first hearing on Tuesday. Capitol police officers are among the first witnesses.
(WASHINGTON) — Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats are considering inviting former House Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman to serve as an adviser to the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the Capitol assault, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.
Riggleman, a former intelligence officer who lost his primary last year, has been a forceful critic of other Republicans over election-related disinformation and QAnon conspiracy theories.
Rep. Liz Cheney, picked by Pelosi to serve on the committee, has been pushing the idea even before Pelosi rejected two of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices on Wednesday.
(PADUCAH, Ky.) — Ten people have been injured in an explosion at a Kentucky Dippin’ Dots factory.
The explosion took place Wednesday at a Dippin’ Dots-owned facility on Industrial Drive in Paducah. The site is not where the ice cream is made, but where ingredients for a third-party company are produced, officials said.
A truck was unloading liquid nitrogen when the eruption took place, but it’s unclear exactly what caused the explosion, Paducah police spokeswoman Robin Newberry said to local ABC Kentucky affiliate WPSD Wednesday.
The 10 injured people were taken to two local hospitals, Newberry said.
Dippin’ Dots, which is headquartered in Paducah, told ABC News: “This is a terrible accident … At this moment, our focus is on the well-being of our fellow employees who were injured.”
The company said they’re working with authorities for a complete investigation into the incident.
Dippin’ Dots CEO Scott Fischer also released a statement to ABC News: “My heart is with our employees, especially those injured in this afternoon’s terrible incident. I care deeply for our employees — they are family to me. Please join me in praying for our employees.”
(LAS VEGAS) — With coronavirus infections on the rise again in the U.S., hospitals across the country are trying to meet the needs of thousands of patients who are testing positive for COVID-19, and are in need of medical care.
One state that has seen a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations has been Nevada, where case levels have swelled by nearly 200% in the last month, the state’s highest level since February, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Basically, we’re reliving 2020 in 2021,” Dr. Angie Honsberg, medical director for the intensive care unit at University Medical Center told ABC News. “We, unfortunately, are back to having a very high number of COVID patients. We have had a break for the last two and a half months and unfortunately, now we’re back to feeling like we were back in January in February when close to half of our ICU was critically ill patients with COVID respiratory failure.”
Since mid-June, the average number of patients being admitted to the hospital each day with COVID-19 in Nevada has tripled, according to the CDC. This marks the highest number of patients seeking care in more than five months.
Although hospitalization levels in Nevada and nationwide remain significantly lower than at their peak in January, as of Wednesday, 38 states and territories are reporting an increase of 10% or more in hospital admissions over the last week, with nearly 22,000 patients hospitalized around the country, the CDC said.
In light of the state’s recent viral resurgence, Nevada joined a growing list of states on Chicago’s travel advisory list, which will require travelers to either quarantine for 10 days or present a negative COVID-19 test result.
The majority of the state’s infections, according to the CDC, appear to be coming from Clark County, home to Las Vegas, where cases have been steadily increasing since June. In the last week, hospital admissions there have increased by more than 16%.
“Sadly, we’re reliving a lot of what we experienced last year, in the recent weeks,” Dr. Luis Medina-Garcia, an infectious disease physician at UMC, told ABC News. “As businesses reopened, and there’s more traffic of tourists to our city, this increased exposure has resulted in new cases of COVID-19 almost exclusively in the unvaccinated population.”
Thus, with cases increasing, last week, the Southern Nevada Health District also announced it would recommend both unvaccinated and vaccinated people wear masks in crowded indoor public places, “where they may have contact with others who are not fully vaccinated.”
Health experts say the likely driving force behind the significant increase in cases across the country has been the highly infectious delta variant, which is now estimated to account for more than 83% of all new cases.
Although it is still unknown whether the delta variant is potentially more dangerous, this strain of the virus is more efficient at transmitting the disease, and Honsberg said it appears to more virulent, with patients becoming sicker faster.
“The current group of patients seems to get sick quicker than the patients that we saw with the earlier COVID outbreak and we’re also seeing, for the most part, a younger group of patients,” Honsberg said.
Some of the patients have very severe pneumonia, Honsberg added.
A similar message is conveyed by Robin Ringler, charge nurse in UMC’s Medical ICU, who said that the patients she is seeing in the ICU are very sick, many struggling to breathe, and on ventilators.
In fact, she said, some of these patients are so sick “that the doctors currently are talking about doing tracheostomy on them, and that is going to keep them on the ventilator for prolonged periods of time because they cannot breathe on their own.”
Ringer’s team is now anticipating more COVID-19 ICU admissions, with a growing number of COVID patients appearing in the emergency room.
“In the last two weeks, we’ve had a real increase in COVID infections in the hospital. Our COVID numbers have gone up so high. They’ve almost, I think they quadrupled from two weeks ago,” Ringler said. “The number of patients seeking treatment has been getting higher every week.”
The increases are a discouraging development, said Ringler, when vaccines were introduced, and cases began to decline, her team thought they may have been finally out of the woods.
According to the White House COVID-19 Task Force, nearly all of these patients, 97%, are unvaccinated.
Just 43% of Nevada residents have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, “which is a growing concern for us, when our data shows that about 85% of our COVID-19 patients are without a history for vaccination,” added Alma Angeles, director of Critical Care Services at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas.
“We’ve had many patients that have told us that they wish they had been vaccinated. Sadly, it’s too late by the time they get to us,” Dr. Luis Medina-Garcia, an Infectious Disease Physician at UMC, told ABC News. “The death toll from this disease is unbearable. It is unspeakable the loss of life, health, and outcomes that we have had to go through. It’s just sad to see people getting sick, for no good reason.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. embassy in Afghanistan has issued its first notifications to Afghans who worked for the U.S. mission and will be evacuated to an American military base in Virginia that flights are set to start next week as the U.S. withdraws the last troops after two decades of war.
But for those Afghans and their families who will be relocated, they will have to find their own way to Kabul, according to a senior State Department official, despite deep concerns about their safety.
The Taliban have waged a summer offensive to seize territory and a psychological victory, as the militant group stalls peace negotiations with the Afghan government.
The top U.S. military officer conceded Wednesday that the Taliban have the “strategic momentum” after winning “a significant amount of territory.”
“There’s a possibility of a negotiated outcome that’s still out there. There’s a possibility of a complete Taliban takeover or a possibility of any number of other scenarios – breakdowns, warlordism, all kinds of other scenarios,” said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The U.S. military withdrawal is 95% complete, but still scheduled to wrap up by Aug. 31, according to the Pentagon. But in the three months since President Joe Biden announced U.S. troops would depart, the security situation has deteriorated, with warnings of all-out civil war or the collapse of the Afghan government.
Before that withdrawal is complete, the Biden administration will evacuate Afghans who have applied for special immigrant visas to the U.S. after working as interpreters, guides and other contractors, a service for which the Taliban have put targets on their backs.
Despite that threat, the State Department said Wednesday it will not be able to provide transportation to Afghans who are approved for evacuation flights but have to make that potentially dangerous journey from home to the capital.
“They would have to get themselves to Kabul. Obviously, we don’t have a substantial U.S. military presence, we don’t have an ability to provide this transportation for them,” the senior official told ABC News.
With the Taliban in control of nearly half of the country’s districts, according to Milley, that risk can be high.
“If they’re, say, in the north of the country and they don’t feel safe staying in Afghanistan, they could go to a neighboring country and finish their SIV application process there,” officials added, using an acronym for the Special Immigrant Visa program.
But the militant group now controls several border crossings to those northern neighbors, leaving it unclear if that journey would be any safer.
So far, the State Department has confirmed that approximately 4,750 Afghan applicants will be relocated, along with their eligible family members like spouses, children and other dependents.
“We owe a great debt to those who have provided valuable and faithful service to the United States, working alongside our military and diplomatic personnel; thereby putting their own lives at risk,” Brian McKeon, the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, who is helping coordinate the effort, told reporters Wednesday.
The first group totals approximately 2,500 Afghans, about 750 applicants and their families, who have already been approved and cleared security vetting, according to senior State Department officials. They will be granted parole to enter the U.S. and be moved to Fort Lee, an Army base in central Virginia, for seven to 10 days as they await the final steps toward receiving their U.S. visa, including a medical evaluation.
An additional 4,000 Afghans, along with their families, will be evacuated from the country to a safe third country or a U.S. military installation overseas, the senior officials said, who declined to say where still, citing ongoing diplomatic conversations with other countries.
That list includes the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, according to two U.S. officials. All three of those locations host U.S. installations. The list also includes Afghanistan’s neighbors in Central Asia, such as Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
The senior officials declined to provide a total estimate for this group because their own estimations vary widely, but one official told ABC News that each applicant brings on average between three and five dependents, which would put the range between 12,000 and 20,000 Afghans in total.
Approximately 20,000 Afghans have applied for this Special Immigrant Visa, according to a State Department spokesperson. But around half of them have not finished their applications, and the senior State Department official said they are “not in a position to move forward with their case until they do so,” which means leaving potentially 10,000 Afghans and their families behind.
Among the other 10,000 who have finished their application, however, it’s still unclear how many more the administration plans to evacuate beyond the 4,750 applicants and their families.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price told ABC News Wednesday that it’s “looking at all potential contingencies” still, neither ruling in or out more evacuations. But for now, “this is the group that we’re speaking to at the moment, the groups that we’re actively making plans for,” he added.
Among other “contingencies,” the administration is also “looking at other options and pathways for people who’ve helped us,” the senior official said, such as development workers, journalists for U.S. media outlets, and prominent women’s rights activists. That could include refugee status, other special visas, or humanitarian parole, which gives a foreign national temporary eligibility to enter the U.S.
While the administration still weighs those options, some critics have demanded they settle on plans urgently, warning of more targeted Taliban attacks against such high-profile targets, especially as they win control of more territory. U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad noted Tuesday that there are “credible reports of atrocities” emerging from Taliban territory, while the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, Chargé d’Affaires Ross Wilson, warned the Taliban were shutting down media in territory it now controlled and “attempting to conceal their violence in a press blackout.”
According to Milley, the Taliban now control about half of the country’s 419 district centers and are pressuring about half of the 34 provincial capitals. But they have yet to capture any capital, as Afghan security forces prioritize holding larger towns and cities, he said.
The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces are “taking an approach to protect the population, and most of the population lives in the provincial capitals, in the capital city of Kabul, so they are right now as we speak adjusting forces to consolidate into the provincial capitals and Kabul.”
He conceded that the Taliban had seized “a significant amount of territory… so momentum appears to be – strategic momentum appears to be sort of with the Taliban.” But he warned that the group was trying to create the impression of an inevitable victory.
“I don’t think the endgame is yet written,” he told reporters Wednesday.
(WASHINGTON) — Puerto Rico could lose Medicaid funding in less than two months, putting at risk roughly 1.5 million people — nearly half the island’s population — unless Congress acts quickly.
As COVID-19 continues to batter the island — with at least 2,561 deaths among 141,905 confirmed cases, according to World Health Organization data — several U.S. representatives have teamed up to propose the Supporting Medicaid in the U.S. Territories Act.
“Territories get less funding through Medicaid than states do, and it has led to all sorts of adverse health outcomes, debt and a sub-standard of living in those areas,” Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., told ABC News in an interview. Puerto Rico was getting “far less than many states, and that led to an erosion of their health care system.”
The territory’s annual Medicaid needs are predicted to reach about $3 billion, but due to restrictions in the Social Security Act Section 11108, Puerto Rico has instead only been given roughly $375 million in Medicaid for the year, Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Pierluisi told ABC News.
Puerto Rico, by statute, is only set to receive 55% of what is needed to fund Medicaid each year from the federal government, according to the think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But since the island’s federal block grant is small and often exhausted, CBPP reports that some years the Medicaid program is funded at less than 20%. Whatever the federal government doesn’t pay for, the island is responsible.
“The funding is not the same we would be getting as a state,” Pierluisi said. “You cannot plan or budget reasonably when you are facing this [Medicaid] cliff every couple of years.”
The new bill states that it would extend the federal Medicaid funding to account for 76% of what is needed for five years, offering much relief during the island’s ongoing economic crisis. Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, also gets 76%.
But with a 43.5% poverty — more than twice that of Mississippi — and higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, asthma and more, Puerto Ricans need reliable health coverage perhaps more than ever.
Roughly 46% of the island’s population relies on Medicaid, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, and almost 44% of Puerto Ricans live in poverty.
“We need that money to provide good medical and hospital services to our population,” said Jorge Galva, executive director of the Puerto Rico Health Insurance Administration. “There is a dire need to provide the full complement of Medicaid services.”
Providing care, Galva added, is made even more difficult as thousands of physicians and other health professionals continue migrating to the U.S. mainland, where they typically receive better pay and enjoy a higher standard of living.
Even with an increased amount of Medicaid funding for Puerto Ricans, Galva said, this wouldn’t be enough to help the island offer some of the federally mandated services, like nursing home care, home health care and nonemergency medical transportation.
“Over the years,” Galva continued, “the gap between the cap on the federal funds for our Medicaid program and the needs of the program grew bigger and bigger and bigger. As a territory, and under the present state of the law, Congress is fully allowed to discriminate and make differences between the treatment to territories and states.”
Local officials are calling on lawmakers to address what’s seen as the U.S. neglecting Puerto Rico because it’s a territory, not a state.
“It’s a matter of fairness and equity that we receive funding in parity with the states and allow Puerto Rico to provide its medically indigent population with all the services they need and deserve,” Galva said.
(HONG KONG) — Rescue efforts are underway as flash floods in China’s central city of Zhengzhou killed at least 25 people and displaced hundreds of thousands of others.
Local forecasters say it is the heaviest downpour they have seen in decades, with nearly a year’s worth of rain coming down in just three days in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, located on the banks of the Yellow River.
The city is home to more than 10 million people and is one of China’s major transportation and logistical hubs, connecting the countryside to the rest of the nation.
The floods are now threatening to disrupt the food security and supply chain in the region, where major roadways have been transformed into riverbanks. Footage from the ground shows cars floating above the muddy floodwater.
Heavy rains overwhelmed some of Zhengzhou’s flood defenses, causing apocalyptic scenes to unfold, including floodwater cascading into subways and a resident being swept away.
More video from the region shows rescue workers at schools, placing kindergarteners in plastic buckets to float them to safety.
Another clip from China’s state television channel shows passengers in a subway car, trapped with water up to their chest. At least a dozen people died in the city’s underground tunnels, with at least seven more still missing. More than 500 people were eventually rescued.
Officials fear the toll from the floods may be much worse than what is known, and they warn that the danger is not over yet as more rainfall is expected over the coming days.
The floods also caused a massive explosion at an aluminium alloy plant in Henan province. No casualties were reported.
Some distressed family members outside of Zhengzhou used social media to try to find their relatives as power lines in the city had gone down.
Officials said the Yihetan Dam in Luoyang, about 90 miles west of Zhengzhou, is in danger of bursting “at any time.” Soldiers have been mobilized to try to prevent the dam from collapsing, blasting part of it to relieve pressure and divert the flooding.
Floods are common during China’s rainy season, but the threat over the years has worsened. Scientists blame the effects of climate change and urbanization.
As recovery efforts continue, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the floods were “extremely severe” and “demanded that authorities at all levels must give top priority to ensuring people’s safety and property,” according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
(LONDON) — The Tokyo Olympics organizing committee fired the director of the opening ceremony on Thursday over a joke he made about the Holocaust as a comedian in 1998.
A video clip resurfaced online of Kentaro Kobayashi’s performance during a comedy show more than 20 years ago, in which he joked about a game he called: “Let’s play Holocaust.” Criticism of Kobayashi, a former member of the popular Japanese comedy duo Rahmens, quickly spread on social media. Then Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, announced on the eve of the opening ceremony that Kobayashi has been dismissed.
“We found out that Mr. Kobayashi, in his own performance, has used a phrase ridiculing a historical tragedy,” Hashimoto said during a press conference Thursday. “We deeply apologize for causing such a development the day before the opening ceremony and for causing troubles and concerns to many involved parties as well as the people in Tokyo and the rest of the country.”
It’s the latest scandal to plague the Tokyo Games. Earlier this year, Hashimoto’s predecessor, Yoshiro Mori, was forced to resign over sexist comments he made suggesting women talk too much in meetings. Hiroshi Sasaki also stepped down as creative director for the opening and closing ceremonies after suggesting Naomi Watanabe, a Japanese actress, comedian and plus-size fashion designer, could wear pig ears at the opening ceremony while performing as what he called an “Olympig.”
“Maybe these negative incidents will impact the positive message we wanted to deliver to the world,” Toshiro Muto, CEO of the Tokyo organizing committee, said during the press conference Thursday.
The organizing committee and the Japanese government have also sparked controversy for pushing ahead with the already-delayed 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, despite public health concerns amid the coronavirus pandemic. Recent polls have shown that a majority of the Japanese public want the Tokyo Games to be postponed further or outright cancelled as the capital city and other regions grapple with a resurgence in COVID-19 infections. Meanwhile, Japan’s top medical experts, including some of the government’s advisers on COVID-19, have warned that holding the Games now could help spread the virus both at home and abroad.
The Nomura Research Institute, a Tokyo-based economic research and consulting firm, estimates that cancelling the Games would cost Japan around $17 billion.
At least 91 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed at the Tokyo Games so far. Four of those cases are people staying at the Olympic and Paralympic Village in the Harumi waterfront district of Tokyo. Two are athletes, according to data released Thursday by the Tokyo organizing committee.
The Tokyo metropolitan government reported 1,979 newly confirmed cases in the city on Thursday, up from 671 last Thursday.
Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga declared another state of emergency in Tokyo due to rising infections. The declaration lasts through Aug. 22, meaning the Olympics, which officially kick off on Friday, will be held entirely under emergency measures. The Paralympics will open on Aug. 24.
Various measures and restrictions, including a ban on all spectators from Olympic venues in Tokyo, are in place during the Games in an effort to reduce the risk of infection.
“We have been preparing for the last year to send a positive message,” Hashimoto told reporters Thursday. “Toward the very end now there are so many incidents that give a negative image toward Tokyo 2020.”
