KC’s Kara Eaker, alternate for U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, tests positive for COVID

Kansas City gymnast Kara Eaker, an alternate for the USA Gymnastics team, has tested positive for COVID-19 in Tokyo ahead of the Olympic Games.

GAGE Gymnastics coach Al Fong told The Star that Eaker, a recent Grain Valley High graduate, is feeling fine and has no symptoms.

Eaker, 18, has been vaccinated for COVID-19, and while she is the first American reported to have tested positive in Japan, she’s not the first vaccinated athlete to test positive. A Ugandan athlete who had been vaccinated with AstraZeneca shots tested negative prior to departure, according to the Associated Press.

Since July 1, at least 55 people affiliated with the Olympics have tested positive in Tokyo. On Sunday, the first athletes in the Olympic Village tested positive. The South African Football Association announced that three among its delegation — two players and a video analyst — tested positive for COVID-19, according to Reuters.

Without naming athletes, USA Gymnastics said in a statement that the alternate who tested positive, and one other athlete in close contact, “would be subject to additional quarantine restrictions.”

Eaker tested positive for the virus Sunday and had arrived in Tokyo on Wednesday.

“Accordingly, on Monday, the Olympic athletes moved to separate lodging accommodations and a separate training facility, as originally planned, and will continue their preparation for the Games,” USA Gymnastics said in a statement. “The entire delegation continues to be vigilant and will maintain strict protocols while they are in Tokyo.”

According to USA Gymnastics (USAG), until the positive test, Eaker and fellow replacement athletes Leanne Wong (also from Kansas City), Emma Malabuyo and Kayla DiCello — as well as their coaches — were training in the same facility as their competitors, though they practiced in separate groups.

The gymnastics team’s alternates were rooming with one another at the hotel, while first-team competitors — including Olympic champion Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles, Sunisa Lee, Grace McCallum, MyKayla Skinner and Jade Carey — were rooming together separately.

Since the positive test, USAG said, all athletes and coaches have been put in separate rooms and Olympic athletes are now in a new hotel. COVID-19 saliva tests were and will continue to be collected every morning from all delegation members, and health assessments are completed every morning, as well.

Dr. Annie Sparrow, a professor of population health science and policy at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said it is known that the vaccines are not 100% protective against the original virus, let alone its variants.

With another case of a fully vaccinated person testing positive — termed a “breakthrough case” — Sparrow noted the limitations of relying on vaccinations to ensure the safety of those in Tokyo. Sparrow has been critical of the International Olympic Committee’s Playbooks that outline protocols for athletes and delegation members at the Games.

“There’s just no way that we can rely (fully) on vaccines, and that’s where the IOC has been really lazy and just sort of assuming that everybody will get vaccinated,” Sparrow said. “And even though they’ve been careful not to demand that, they’ve made that the sort of the emphasis and they’ve just failed to put in all the other incredibly important things that are really going to protect (people). I mean, in any scenario vaccines (alone) are not going to be enough.

“We all make the mistake of thinking that vaccines are going to stop the spread of a disease, but that’s not what vaccines are designed to do … they’re designed to protect you from getting sick, they’re not designed to protect you from getting the disease: If you get it, they’re designed to stop you from getting really sick. And that is the only basis on which we license vaccines.”

Sparrow, who analyzed the second version of the IOC Playbook, cited several key issues with the protocols. Among the most significant were a lack of guidance on the time-limited protection of standard masks (the IOC expects athletes to furnish their own). Sparrow said if masks aren’t fitted properly, they will only protect people from inhaling the disease in an indoor space for an hour — after that, she said, they’re “useless.”

Among other concerns she noted were a lack of HEPA air filters, lack of differentiation between low- and high-risk events and the absence of any apparent plan for postponing events, should the need arise.

“They’re basically using science that is a year old, working on this assumption that (the virus) was droplet-spread,” Sparrow said. “And that’s pretty pathetic, although the WHO and the CDC were very slow to update their priors and say it’s aerosol, which is basically means it’s a very fine microscopic particle; it’s not a big droplet that just lands on the surface … they’re not taking a risk based approach, they’re not identifying the places where the people and athletes and the support staff are likely to be at high risk.”

While the opening ceremony for the Games is scheduled for Friday in Tokyo, some events are set to begin sooner.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Japan has reached 842,000 and there’s been a daily new-case average of 2,843 for the past seven days. Many in the Japanese public and medical community have been opposed to the Games moving forward.

With vaccination rates still low (under 30% as of Monday) and a rise in cases, Tokyo has entered a state of emergency and spectators have been banned from attending all Olympic events in hopes of mitigating spread.