A 19-year-old in Hiroshima Prefecture staunchly opposed to holding the Tokyo Olympics in the middle of a pandemic has found herself with an unlikely new hobby: She is glued to the screen, hooked on the Games.

The pandemic had robbed her of her normal school life. Her school’s athletic and cultural festivals were all canceled. Her plan to join an after-school activity “circle” was shattered.

“How come only the Olympics gets OK'ed?” she had wondered in bitterness.

So, what changed her disposition?

Getting COVID-19, she said.

She contracted the virus, developed a fever of 39 degrees and has been stuck in isolation in a hotel in the prefecture since July 23, the day the Tokyo Olympics officially kicked off.

When she checked into her room on the seventh floor of the hotel, she was riddled with concern, wondering if she would suffer permanent damage.

Two days later, she found herself weeping, alone in her room.

It was not from her gnawing angst, but from watching two Japanese siblings win gold medals in judo. Uta Abe, 21, won the women’s 52-kilogram category, and her brother Hifumi, 23, won the men’s 66-kg class, on July 25.

The inspirational televised shot of the brother and sister holding up their gold medals together was what set her off.

“I’m not easily moved to tears,” she said. “But I, too, have a younger brother. And I was probably mentally weak.”

Being in quarantine is otherwise dreadfully boring.

She is only allowed to leave her room three times a day to go to another room, about 10 meters away on the same floor, to get a bento boxed meal.

She is required to check and report her body temperature and oxygen saturation level twice a day.

She can still call her friends. But she has not done so because she does not want them to know she has contracted the novel coronavirus.

Checking her smartphone for hours at a time left her eyes strained, and she could only stare out the window watching people come and go from a nearby convenience store for so long.

Initially, she did not want to turn on the television, but she became absorbed in thought from the silence, so she decided to leave the TV on, which airs a steady stream of the Olympics, all day and even while she sleeps at night.

She rarely watches sports, but she started watching the Olympics “only because I was bored and felt lonely.”

Soon she was passionately watching the events, absorbed in the way athletes overcome adversity. Regardless of the sport, she tears up every time a Japanese athlete wins a medal.

She does not understand the rules of some events, like skateboarding, but she found herself reassured just by watching.

But when she watches athletes hug each other or notices when people in the stands are not wearing their masks, she worries that the coronavirus might spread at the events.

She said she had declined her friends’ invitations to go out and adopted an extra-careful approach to life during the pandemic. But that did not prevent her from contracting the virus.

Currently, her temperature is back to normal and she only has a few other mild symptoms.

“I think I have immersed myself in the (Olympics) so that I don’t have to think about the fact that I’m in isolation,” she said.

She is not alone.

Many COVID-19 patients in isolation have stared at their TV screens alone in the vacuum of their hotel rooms and tuned into the Olympics seeking comfort and an escape from reality as they pass the time.

Yoshiaki Ikenaga, 31, a company employee in Nara Prefecture, has been in isolation at a hotel there since July 27 after contracting the virus and will remain in his room for roughly another week.

His accommodations are spacious and he said the meals provided are more delicious than he expected.

He has a fever of 38 degrees but has not developed any unbearable symptom so far.

But every time he hears a hotel announcement instructing people in quarantine “not to go outside their room,” he suddenly becomes nervous again, as he is brought back to the reality of being in isolation.

He feels guilty that he “has stayed in a nice environment, eaten well and not done any work.”

Watching the Olympics helps him to take his mind off those negative feelings.

“It is impossible to watch all the Olympic events, but I want to watch as many of the events as possible,” he said.