The Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC) has advised athletes and various sports federations aspiring to send their contingents to the forthcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics to discountenance the various reports on the existence of the deadly coronavirus disease in Japan and continue with their preparations for the championship.
The NOC told The Guardian yesterday that it was monitoring the situation in Asia, adding that the Federal Government would decide if the situation was bad enough to stop Nigeria from attending the games.
NOC spokesman, Phemmy Adetula urged the athletes to rather focus on their qualifiers to ensure they get the ticket to fly the nation’s flag in the Asian country, adding that the NOC was still waiting for directives from the International Olympic Committee ( IOC) on the state of the disease in Japan.
He stressed that the Nigerian delegation will not be allowed to travel to Japan in July if eventually the organisers could not guarantee the safety of the athletes.
“The NOC is still waiting on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to make pronouncement on the level of the spread of Coronavirus in Japan. But since there is no emergency report on the virus from the IOC, I believe all is well at this moment,” he said.
Meanwhile, Japan which has already witnessed cases of the coronavirus few months after its out break in Wuhan, China, last week quarantined a giant cruise ship when it arrived at Port Yokohama.
It was reported that 64 people from the ship have tested positive for the virus.
According to reports, Japan is scrambling to prevent larger outbreak of coronavirus, as the country prepares to welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors for the summer Olympics starting in Tokyo, Japan July.
The Japanese government quarantined the ship called the Diamond Princess when it emerged that a man who had disembarked in Hong Kong on January 25 had tested positive of coronavirus.
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