COVID-19 infection risk assessment and management at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games: A scoping review

Abstract

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games was one of the largest international mass-gathering events held after the beginning of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this scoping review, we extracted papers discussing COVID-19 risk assessment or management at the Tokyo 2020 Games to determine the nature of studies that were conducted. Among the 75 papers obtained from two search engines (PubMed and ScienceDirect) and four papers collected from hand-searches, 30 papers were extracted. Only eight papers performed both COVID-19 prior risk assessment and quantitative evaluation of effectiveness measures, highlighting the importance of rapid, solution-focused risk assessment. Furthermore, this review revealed that the findings regarding the spread of COVID-19 infection to citizens in the host country were inconsistent depending on the assessment methods and that assessments of the spread of infection outside the host country were lacking.

Keywords: COVID-19; Mass gatherings; Risk assessment; Risk management; Tokyo 2020 Olympic Paralympic Games.

Fig. 1

Flow of papers identified in this scoping review.

Fig. 2

Distribution of paper types. The number to the right of the bar represents the number of papers. RA: risk assessment; RM: risk management. ^a One paper had corresponding authors from two countries, namely, Qatar and the United Kingdom. ^b Epidemiology included studies involving human participants and genomes extracted from human participants. ^c Testing included quarantine; basic measures included ventilation, masks, physical distance, hand-washing, disinfection, and regulation of human flow; comprehensive measures represented a set of various measures, such as overall measures used in the Tokyo 2020 Games. ^d Papers that performed both prior risk assessment and quantitative evaluation of measure effectiveness. ^e Papers that performed both ex-post risk assessment and quantitative evaluation of measure effectiveness. ^f Papers that performed prior risk assessment and were submitted before the Tokyo 2020 Games. ^g Papers that performed prior risk assessment and were published before the Tokyo 2020 Games.