In his two decades as a consultant to organizations vying to host the Olympic Games, Terrence Burns helped write and review official bids and plans from dozens of potential candidate cities.

In all those bids, he said, discussions of potential disruptions to the event were fairly narrow in scope: mostly natural disasters, like earthquakes or fires, and, more recently, terrorist attacks.

“I’ve never seen an Olympic organizing committee asked, ‘Are you prepared for a global pandemic?’” Burns said this week.

Now, with just under five months to go before the scheduled opening of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo on July 24, organizers in Japan and at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Switzerland are grappling with the coronavirus outbreak, which is threatening to derail the world’s largest sporting event.