Reggae Boyz doctor Lincoln Cox has deemed the recent tour of Japan a success from a medical perspective.

He attributed the zero COVID-19-positive results to foundational work before leaving Jamaica, the strict adherence to basic protocols in transit, and the airtight bubble on arrival in the east Asian nation.

Japan, which will host the Olympic Games scheduled to start in a few short weeks, is fighting a fourth wave and a new strain of the novel coronavirus.

It has implemented robust countermeasures to secure visitors entering the country, including sporting teams arriving for the 2020 Games, which were pushed forward to this year due to the pandemic and its attending fears and lack of institutionalised response at the time.

Jamaica’s footballers, who spent two weeks in the country for two friendly matches, got a taste of the restrictive protocols.

Even though the bubble was suffocating from a mental point of view, Dr Cox thought it was key to keeping the delegation of 19 players and 14 officials virus-free, hence a medically successful tour.

“When you look at the protocols starting in Jamaica, then getting into Miami and then Japan; when you look at the number of SARS-COVID-19 tests that were done on delegation members and all of them coming back negative plus, generally, we have been asymptomatic for the entire tour, I think it has been a very successful trip medically.

“We knew that the success of this trip would depend on whether we kept those protocols or not,” Cox told the Jamaica Observer.

The specialist general surgeon, who works mostly with Jamaican athletics, says his first outing with the Boyz availed many firsts.

“I think this is the hardest I have ever worked because of the current situation of the pandemic, but mentally and physically we were prepared going there, knowing it was going to be a tight bubble that we were going into.

“We knew that our movement and behaviour could mean the success or failure of the trip, and so we knew we were going to be tested regularly and that we had to adhere to that level of discipline, for example turning up for testing on time and all the time, plus we had to do our clinical checks every morning.

“We knew we had to adhere to this regime going into Japan, and all of that made it a little bit harder, and there were no room for errors or being lackadaisical in maintaining those protocols,” Cox explained.

He supports the view that the success of the visit also spoke to Jamaica’s ability to manage sporting teams travelling abroad in a pandemic world.

“It is a new phenomenon [pandemic] and as time goes on, we get better at managing it…we are now in the era of vaccines, so we are coping better.

“Knowing what we are dealing with and knowing what to do, we would have gotten some of the things we didn’t know out of the way, and we would have been tighter in terms of our adhering to the protocols and to carry out the necessary things that we know we have to do in order to maintain a negative status,” Cox reasoned.

On the mission — where the Boyz spent time in capital Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya — only Boyz Head Coach Theodore “Tappa” Whitmore had to be treated for a “minor” illness.

“We have to remember that as long as you are dealing with human beings, there are always going to be medical issues, and these issues can be major and minor.

“In the case of Coach Whitmore, he had a minor problem where he had a bit of gastroenteritis, but he has since recovered and is doing quite well,” noted Cox.

He added that as soon as the coach reported not feeling well, the medical response machine went into overdrive.

“Some of the symptoms that he would have experienced are symptomology which would be concerned with SARS-COVID-2, and he was the only person who was exhibiting some of these symptoms, so we had isolated him. He was repeatedly tested, three times during that time, and twice in one day, and he was negative and negative to date,” Cox said.

He explained that gastroenteritis could either be bacterial or viral.

“The usual causes of gastroenteritis are related to bacteria in the food you eat…it can be viral as well depending on the symptomology and signs that the patient may exhibit. Just by eating different foods, coming into a new area, a new country, coming across new viruses and new bacteria, individuals can get gastroenteritis, which normally lasts for a very short time, usually two to three days and then the patient will be fine.

“He [Whitmore] experienced something like that, which was minor,” concluded Cox, who works at Savanna-lar-Mar Public General Hospital in Westmoreland.

On tours to Saudi Arabia in November and Austria in March, the Boyz had to deal with a number of COVID-19-positive cases among their group.