Tara Kirk, Public Health Expert, On The Tokyo Olympics
Courtesy of Tara Kirk Sellk, Think Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Tara Kirk Sell is an American Olympic swimming medalist and Stanford University graduate who went onto becoming a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
At the Center, she conducts, manages, and leads research projects to develop a greater understanding of potentially large-scale health events. She also serves as an Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Health Security and co-directs the Health Security PhD track within the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.
Dr. Kirk recently wrote Tokyo Olympics Health Measures Are a Game Changer about the COVID-19 containment measures, such as frequent testing, that were put in place at the Tokyo Olympic Games to prevent spread of the virus.
Read on here.
Braden Keith, the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of SwimSwam, pondered about the possibilities of athletes testing positive for COVID-19 at the Olympics. He tweeted, “We don’t yet know who, we don’t know when…but at this point, we almost have to assume that a medal contender in swimming for the Olympic Games will probably test positive for COVID. It’s clear from early results that every sport will be impacted.”
American tennis player Coco Gauff had to withdraw from the Olympics after she recently tested positive for COVID-19 mere days before the start of the Games. Gauff tweeted, “I want to wish Team USA best of luck and a safe games for every Olympian and the entire Olympic family.”
With the Olympics starting this week, both Dr. Kirk and Keith will most likely be correct in their assumptions and predictions about the athletes in Tokyo [who will sleep on cardboard beds, shown above].
