Hospitals in Japan's second largest city of Osaka are buckling under a huge wave of new coronavirus infections, running out of beds and ventilators as exhausted doctors warn of a "system collapse", and advise against holding the Olympics this summer.
Japan's western region home to 9 million people is suffering the brunt of the fourth wave of the pandemic, accounting for a third of the nation's death toll in May, although it constitutes just 7% of its population.
The speed at which Osaka's healthcare system was overwhelmed underscores the challenges of hosting a major global sports event in two months' time, particularly as only about half of Japan's medical staff have completed inoculations.
"Simply put, this is a collapse of the medical system," said Yuji Tohda, the director of Kindai University Hospital in Osaka.
"The highly infectious British variant and slipping alertness have led to this explosive growth in the number of patients."
Japan has avoided the large infections suffered by other nations, but the fourth pandemic wave took Osaka prefecture by storm, with 3,849 new positive tests in the week to Thursday.
That represents a more than fivefold jump over the corresponding period three months ago.
Just 14% of the prefecture's 13,770 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalised, leaving the majority to fend for themselves. Tokyo's latest hospitalisation rate, in comparison, is 37%.
A government advisory panel sees rates of less than 25% as a trigger to consider imposition of a state of emergency.
By Thursday, 96% of the 348 hospital beds Osaka reserves for serious virus cases were in use. Since March, 17 people have died from the disease outside the prefecture's hospitals, officials said this month.
The variant can make even young people very sick quickly, and once seriously ill, patients find it tough to make a recovery, said Toshiaki Minami, director of the Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital (OMPUH).
1/5 Medical workers at Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital work in the operation wing of the hospital, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Takatsuki, Osaka prefecture, Japan May 17, 2021. REUTERS/Akira Tomoshige Read More
"I believe that until now many young people thought they were invincible. But that can't be the case this time around. Everyone is equally bearing the risk."
Minami said a supplier recently told him that stocks of propofol, a key drug used to sedate intubated patients, are running very low, while Tohda's hospital is running short of the ventilators vital for severely ill COVID-19 patients.
Caring for critically ill patients in the face of infection risk has taken a serious toll on staff, said Satsuki Nakayama, the head of the nursing department at OMPUH.
"I've got some intensive care unit (ICU) staff saying they have reached a breaking point," she added. "I need to think of personnel change to bring in people from other hospital wings."
About 500 doctors and 950 nurses work at OMPUH, which manages 832 beds. Ten of its 16 ICU beds have been dedicated to virus patients. Twenty of the roughly 140 serious patients taken in by the hospital died in the ICU.
Yasunori Komatsu, who heads a union of regional government employees, said conditions were dire as well for public health nurses at local health centres, who liaison between patients and medical institutions.
"Some of them are racking up 100, 150, 200 hours of overtime, and that has been going on for a year now...when on duty, they sometimes go home at one or two in the morning, and go to bed only to be awakened by a phone call at three or four."
Medical professionals with firsthand experience of Osaka's struggle with the pandemic take a negative view on holding the Tokyo Games, set to run from July 23 to August 8.
"The Olympics should be stopped, because we already have failed to stop the flow of new variants from England, and next might be an inflow of Indian variants," said Akira Takasu, the head of emergency medicine at OMPUH.
He was referring to a variant first found in India that the World Health Organisation (WHO) designated as being of concern after initial studies showed it spread more easily.
"In the Olympics, 70,000 or 80,000 athletes and the people will come to this country from around the world. This may be a trigger for another disaster in the summer."
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
QuantumHope on May 24th, 2021 at 02:54 UTC »
I wonder what their vaccination rate is.
autotldr on May 24th, 2021 at 02:01 UTC »
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 83%. (I'm a bot)
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: patients#1 Hospital#2 Osaka#3 people#4 bed#5
wormjob on May 24th, 2021 at 01:39 UTC »
Japan enjoyed a grace period but now things here are going downhill fast.
There's a glacial vaccine rollout and a widespread public belief that vaccines not developed specifically for Japanese physiology are unsafe. The government is in a permanent state of, "Too little, too late" with regard to practically every aspect of handling the pandemic.
It's still business as usual across much of the country with even the prefectures affected by States of Emergency basically only having "recommended" shortened hours of operation for certain businesses. Contradictory messages confuse the public - "Stay home, but here's a bunch of vouchers for discounted restaurant dining." The media a prefectural health center issues a warning to Japanese to not dine with foreigners, as they are a "significant source of the virus" even though the borders have been closed to all non-essential transit for a year and several tens of thousands of foreign people are set to enter the country in a few months' time for some frivolous sports entertainment (at the outcry of lawyers the media later retracted their PSA).
The public is "fatigued" by the pandemic in spite of having never been under lockdown and many have reached the point where, just as things are starting to get bad for real, they can no longer wait for a return to normalcy. The result is things like 45km traffic jams leading back to Tokyo after the Golden Week holiday and sudden infection clusters popping up in tourist destinations and rural cities and towns.
And then there's the Olympics, which are still going forward in spite of roughly 80% of the public and most of Japan's doctors and virtually the entire rest of the world indicating that it's complete insanity not to cancel.
I've somehow not caught the virus yet, but I think it's a matter of time given that I work in the public school system which has been open this entire time, except two weeks in March 2020 when numbers were a fraction what they are now.
Stay tuned for horror stories coming out of Japan during the latter half of 2021.
*Edit: fact correction re: foreigner dining PSA