Tokyo feared Games would spread COVID; numbers suggest that didn't happen

Before the Olympics began, Japan had feared that the 2020 Games, with thousands of officials, media and athletes descending on Tokyo in the middle of a pandemic, might spread COVID-19, introduce new variants and overwhelm the medical system.

But as the Games draw near their end, the infection numbers from inside the Olympic "bubble" - a set of venues, hotels and the media centre to which those coming for the Games had been mostly confined - tell a different story.

Featuring more than 50,000 people, what amounted to possibly the largest global experiment of this kind since the pandemic began, appears to have largely worked, organisers and some scientists say, with only a sliver of those involved infected.

"Before the Olympics, I thought people would come to Japan with many variants and Tokyo would be a melting pot of viruses and some new variant would emerge in Tokyo," Kei Sato, a senior researcher at the University of Tokyo said.