At the beginning of April, a young Japanese sumo wrestler known as
Shobushi came down with a fever. His coaches tried calling a local
public health centre to get him a coronavirus test, but the phone lines
were busy.
For four days, he was turned away by clinics in Tokyo overwhelmed
during a surge of COVID-19 cases. He was finally admitted to hospital on
April 8 when he began coughing up blood, but died of the disease on May
13, the Japan Sumo Association said.To get more news about WikiFX, you can visit wikifx official website.
Shobushi's death caused a public outcry over Japan's testing
limitations and reliance on overstretched public health centres at a
time when most experts say widespread virus checks are crucial to
contain the pandemic.
With Japan lifting its state of emergency and reopening its
economy this week, its pandemic response has been hailed as an unlikely
success. In a global death toll of more than 300,000, Japan has
confirmed around 800 deaths from 16,000 cases.
Yet at the same time, Japan ranks the second lowest in its testing among OECD countries.
As of May 20, Japan conducted 3.4 tests per 1,000 people, far
below Italy's 52.5 and 39 in the United States, according to Oxford
University data. South Korea has carried out tests on 15 people per
1,000 people.
In more than a dozen interviews with Reuters, public health
officials, doctors and experts warned Japan's slow scaling up of tests
could mask the scale of infections and make its population vulnerable to
future outbreaks.
Critics say vested interests and bureaucracy inside Japan's health
ministry caused bottlenecks at overworked public health centres, and
officials waited too long to allow private labs to run tests.
“It is true that announced figures for infection and deaths are
low, but those are based on the tests that were curbed,” said Yasuharu
Tokuda, the director of the Muribushi Okinawa Center for Teaching
Hospitals. “It is clear that there are quite a few (cases) that have
fallen through the cracks.”
Even the government's top advisor, Shigeru Omi, told parliament
“nobody knows” whether the true number of coronavirus cases “could be 10
times, 12 times or 20 times more than reported.”
Omi's panel of experts has called on the government to speed up testing, including of people with mild symptoms.
The health ministry said it is ramping up the use of private labs to reduce the workload on public health centres.
“Our stance that tests should be conducted on people in need has
been consistent from the beginning. We have had testing capacity
increased continuously,” Takuma Kato, a senior health ministry official,
told Reuters.
“NOT ENOUGH” TESTS
Public health centres are at the forefront of Japan's response to
the pandemic. While South Korea bolstered its public health system in
the wake of past epidemics, Japan has halved the number of public health
centres since the 1990s.
Struggling with overworked staff and flooded with calls, public
health centres have asked the government to allow more private clinics
to administer polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
Japan says it can run up to 22,000 PCR tests a day, but less than a
third - around 6,000 tests - are actually conducted on a daily basis.
About 75% of tests have been processed through public health centres and
government institutions, according to the health ministry.
In a previously unreported May 6 letter, the association of public
health centre directors urged Katsunobu Kato, the minister of health,
to overhaul Japan's testing policy.
