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Comment by manojlds | Hacker News Reader

At this rate the Tokyo olympics might be cancelled.

Will the entire 2020 olympics be cancelled in that case? Or would it be moved or postponed?

It's too late to move it. The run up to hosting an Olympics lasts years and even recent hosts like Rio (2016) would have to do a lot of work to refresh facilities. [0]

[0] As soon as a year after they were already just sitting empty and falling into disrepair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMgPEz29abI

If it gets serious enough for Japan to cancel, nobody else is going to be able to host it either. It's supposed to be a worldwide competition, there's no point having it if half the world can't attend and the other half really, really doesn't want to.

If national quarantine's were holding in theory they could maybe move it if another venue were possible.

It'd be shocking to say the least, the only Olympics that have been skipped in the modern era were '16, '40 and '44 and that's because there were the World Wars going on at the time. The closest I think we've gotten to a similar scare would be SARS on 2002 but that was just starting iirc when the winter games in Salt Lake City started.

Would it be fair to assume Japan may be downplaying the outbreak so that they do not risk losing the 2020 Olympics? It's quite a large investment that would get no return if it were to be cancelled.

Wasn't there something similar in Brazil few years ago ?

Zika. This is very much on a different level.

Thanks, yeah I assume it's biologically comparable, I was just curious about the massive social event side of things

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