Sally Jenkins: Why the 2020 Olympics must be called off now

Sally Jenkins joins Miles Davies to discuss her column for The Washington Post. Call the Olympics off. It's time. The Tokyo Games cannot possibly go forward without jeopardizing people all around the world, and every day that International Olympic Committee officials hesitate, they contribute to the crisis and the imminent collapse of medical systems. A hard shutdown is the responsible thing to do, and anything less is negligent, maybe even lethally so.The models and projections are clear, and the reality on the ground is brutal, from Italy to Iran to Seattle to New York. An emergency room doctor in a large hospital in the Washington, D.C.-region, an old friend, tells me that without widespread, immediate and dramatic stay-at-home measures, coronavirus could "make the Spanish Flu look like a party." She hasn't seen her daughter in a week or her elderly father in two, and every night as she disinfects herself, she worries about colleagues in harder-hit regions who are trying to bleach and reuse protective gear meant for single use, their masks and gowns and goggles, because their supplies are already running out.I tell her that Thomas Bach, the IOC president, insists the Olympics should go forward because they are a "beacon of hope." She says, "That's beyond nonsense. The IOC should be sending a warning signal, not a beacon."Bach and other officials continue to intone that it's too early to cancel or postpone because everything might be fine by July. United States Olympic and Paralympic committee chair Susanne Lyons said in a teleconference on Friday, "We don't have to make a decision. Our Games are not next week, or two weeks from now. They're four months from now. And I think a lot may change in that time period."Wrong. They do need to make a decision - and make it now. The entire world is behind on this disease, lagging. Have they not been listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci? We don't have time. We don't have time for the IOC's hemming platitudes, and the USOPC's vague blather.Do the basic math. Things are accelerating. Cases in New York are doubling overnight. There were 245,000 cases worldwide as of Friday, and while it took three months to count the first 100,000 infections, it took just 12 days to reach the 200,000 mark. Hong Kong has reported its single biggest jump in cases to date, apparently because people are still traveling. Get it? The disease is speeding up because we aren't shutting down fast enough.We don't have time for athletes to keep training, or meeting with coaches, risking infection or becoming asymptomatic spreaders. We don't have time for women's soccer players to go to events like the one in Dallas on March 11 that may have exposed them. After which, they traveled and congregated in pro league training camps, like the Washington Spirit, which flew to West Palm just last week.The name of the game is to buy a little time - just a little time - so that hospitals can prepare and supply, or resupply or repurpose. And the way to do that is with shutdowns and social distances. So that hospitals will not become quite so crushed four months from now, and fewer patients will be sentenced to death for lack of beds and ventilators, or caregivers become sick because they lack protective gear. So that other regions don't experience what's happening in northern Italy, where Dr. Marcello Natali died just a day ago, after warning that medics had run out of latex gloves. A total of 110 doctors out of 600 in the province of Bergamo are apparently sick. "We're acting like we have time and we don't," my doctor friend says.Shut the Games down and shut them down now.The IOC and its partner USOPC are critical messengers with tremendous reach and potential for good - or bad. Messaging matters. When the NBA promptly suspended its season because of Rudy Gobert's positive test, the audience finally understood the infection threat from a handshake, or a shoulder bump, was...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.