Japanese medics are warning more must be done to prevent COVID-19 from overwhelming the country’s healthcare system as confirmed cases passed 10,000, despite a nationwide state of emergency.
Experts have been alarmed by a recent spike in COVID-19 infections, with hundreds detected daily.
Japan’s outbreak remains less severe than in hard-hit European countries, but its caseload is one of Asia’s highest after China and India, and is roughly on par with South Korea.
Photo: Reuters
There have been 171 deaths recorded so far in Japan and 10,751 cases, with the country under a month-long state of emergency, which initially covered seven regions but is now in place nationwide.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has urged residents to reduce contact with other people by 70 to 80 percent, and the number of people on Tokyo’s normally packed transport system has dropped significantly.
Yet the measures do not prevent people from going out, and many shops and even restaurants remain open, even as medical associations warn the country’s healthcare system is struggling to cope.
“The system is on the verge of collapse in many places in Japan,” said Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious diseases at Kobe University who has repeatedly criticized the government’s response to the crisis.
Speaking at a news briefing yesterday, Iwata said that Japan’s strategy of limited testing and intensive contact-tracing worked well in the initial phase of the local outbreak, when numbers were small.
However, he said Japan failed to adapt as the outbreak grew.
“We needed to prepare for once the situation changes, once the cluster-chasing became not effective and we needed to change strategy immediately, but traditionally speaking, and historically speaking, Japan is not very good at changing strategy,” he said. “We are very poor at even thinking of plan B because thinking of plan B is a sign of admitting failure of plan A.”
Japan’s government says that it has adjusted its strategy, boosting testing capacity, changing rules that required all positive cases to remain in hospitals where wards quickly became full, and imposing the state of emergency to reduce the spread.
Yet medical experts have called the measures insufficient.
“Beds for novel coronavirus patients continue to be almost full,” Tokyo Medical Association president Haruo Ozaki said on Friday last week.
The association has been increasing beds, but with a large number of new cases coming in every day, “beds are being occupied instantly,” he said.
Japanese Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Katsunobu Kato has acknowledged that hospitals have in some cases turned away suspected coronavirus patients in ambulances.
“Japan hasn’t built a system in which ordinary hospitals can take infectious disease patients in an emergency, when designated hospitals can’t cope,” Ozaki said.
“We are doing our best ... but infections are spreading faster than expected,” he added.
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