COVID-19 Coronavirus: situation in Japan

thomas said:

If I'd condemn the alcohol, I'd be a blatant hypocrite myself, lol. However, boozing in the heat makes people drop their guard. I thought about stopping and taking a photo but I didn't want to expose myself to a potential cluster.

@ authorities: had their been police present they would have acted as a deterrent, at least.

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Uncle Frank said:

One thing I don't understand. Here in the US , besides getting the shot , they make mask wearing seem like the holy grail of protection. It seems almost every picture I see in Japan , 99% of the people are wearing a mask , but the virus is still spreading like wildfire. Is the spread because of the lack of vaccinated people? If mask use is so important , why isn't it helping more there?

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mdchachi said:

My colleagues in Tokyo all got their second shots this week, organized via the company. So I'm glad the vaccine rollout has reached to the younger salaryman level. That should help.

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The Japanese government has named three people this week who broke quarantine rules after returning from overseas in an attempt to shame others into complying with anti-virus measures. The authorities are hoping to tap into traits, such as the sense of collective and the importance of not breaking social norms, that Japan is known for. However, fatigue from prolonged states of emergency and ire at quarantine exceptions made for Olympic athletes may mean the "name and shame" policy has limited effect, or will even backfire. The names – but no other details – of the three rule-breakers who are reported to have avoided contact with authorities during their 14-day mandatory quarantine were announced on Monday. Some social media users attempted to identify the trio but there was little public outcry. "If the publicising of people's names makes them ashamed, then that will work on Japanese people," said Masafumi Usui, a professor of social psychology at Niigata Seiryo University. "But it depends not on the rules or laws, but how people in society react. If the rules are seen as proper and correct, and people break them, they will feel dishonour and shame.

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The variant was detected in a woman in her 30s at Haneda Airport who arrived from Peru on July 20, according to the ministry. She tested positive for the coronavirus in a quarantine check at the airport, with no symptoms. The virus was confirmed to be of the lambda variant in an analysis by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases. According to the institute, the lambda variant was first detected in Peru in August last year and has been spreading in South America. Compared with the conventional strain, the variant may be more infectious and have stronger resistance to vaccines, but its details are not known, the institute said.

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SARS-CoV-2 Lambda, a new variant of interest, is now spreading in some South American countries; however, its virological features and evolutionary trait remain unknown. Here we reveal that the spike protein of the Lambda variant is more infectious and it is attributed to the T76I and L452Q mutations. The RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, a unique 7-amino-acid deletion mutation in the N-terminal domain of the Lambda spike protein, is responsible for evasion from neutralizing antibodies. Since the Lambda variant has dominantly spread according to the increasing frequency of the isolates harboring the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, our data suggest that the insertion of the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation is closely associated with the massive infection spread of the Lambda variant in South America.

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The Tojun Hospital in Adachi Ward, Tokyo, allocated six beds for suspected COVID-19 patients, but those have filled since July, forcing the hospital to turn down requests to accept new patients. "It's difficult to secure any more beds than this," said Masashi Ito, 65, the director of the hospital. "We are reaching the limit of what we can do." The occupancy rate of hospital beds in Tokyo had reached 61.5% as of Thursday, up 28 points from July 12 when the fourth state of emergency was declared for the capital. The rate for beds allocated for seriously ill COVID-19 patients was at 55.6%, based on the Tokyo metropolitan government's criteria. The figures suggest that there is capacity to spare, but according to a source at a university hospital in Tokyo, many hospitals lack the staff to deal with seriously ill patients, making it difficult to accept new patients. Medical treatment for non-COVID-19 maladies has also been affected. In late July, the metropolitan government asked medical institutions in Tokyo to postpone non-urgent surgeries and take other actions to secure more beds for COVID-19 patients. Some hospitals have postponed scheduled procedures or scaled down regular medical services.

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Research by a team from the University of Tokyo, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that three mutations in Lambda's spike protein help it resist neutralization by vaccine-induced antibodies. Meanwhile, two mutations in the Lambda variant - T76I and L452Q - make it more infectious than the COVID variant that swept through the world in 2020. The conclusions of the study posted on BiorXiv on July 28 matched findings—also not yet peer-reviewed—by a team in Chile that found the variant might also evade vaccine antibodies, Infection Control reported.[...] However, the Japanese researchers said that the threat of the variant might be underestimated given that it was only named as a "variant of concern." "Lambda can be a potential threat to the human society," senior researcher Kei Sato of the University of Tokyo said, according to Reuters.

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johnnyG said:

@thomas Minor point , but I like the map in this most recent post much better than the previous tables.

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thomas said:

"Japan confirmed the first case of the lambda variant in a woman who'd arrived from Peru."

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• Osaka reported 2,296 infections, its first single-day number over 2000 and a record high; other "records": Fukuoka (1,253), Aichi (1,227), Hyogo (1,088), Okinawa (761), Shizuoka (590), Gifu (338), Gunma (314), Okayama (307), Hiroshima (302), Mie (276), Oita (162), Nagano (152), Miyazaki (125), Toyama (121), Yamaguchi (105) and Yamanashi (93)
• Nationwide: 23,917 cases
• Okinawa saw its biggest cluster ever, 166 people who got infected in a hospital; 64 died (news in Japanese and in English)
• NHK reported a shortage of oxygen enrichers (news in Japanese)

As of Aug. 11, 74,135 patients with COVID-19 are recuperating at home across the nation, according to the health ministry, jumping to 13 times the number four weeks earlier. The patients were fighting the disease at home due to public health centers assessing their symptoms as mild or not serious enough to require hospitalization as health care systems around the country are at near full capacity for accepting patients. Most of the patients battling the virus at home, more than 60 percent, are in the Tokyo metropolitan area, including Kanagawa Prefecture. An alarming fact about patients with COVID-19 is that mild or moderate symptoms can worsen abruptly and become fatal. In Tokyo, the deaths of seven patients have been reported so far in August alone, including a man in his 30s with no underlying health conditions.

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At least once a day, local government officials check the temperature of these patients by phone or smartphone application, and also check the status of their breathing and if they have symptoms including a cough, general malaise, nausea or diarrhea. Symptoms to watch out for as signs of a worsening situation include purple lips, increased breathing rate, sudden difficulty breathing, chest pains, an inability to breathe without sitting down, clouding of consciousness, and an abnormal pulse. If the patients themselves or those living with them, such as family members, notice any of these signs, they should immediately contact their local government office. Coronavirus patients sometimes do not feel like they are suffocating even when their blood oxygen levels drop as symptoms progress. For this reason, the central government will improve the distribution of pulse oximeters, which measure oxygen saturation levels. Infectious disease experts call for caution when there is a sudden drop in blood oxygen levels, such as when they fall below 95% in home care patients.

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musicisgood said:

This hasn't really been a good year to go cycling and camping around Japan. Here I was going to go to Shikoku once this rain stops, but now the figures are bad and probably the campgrounds are closed.

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"The situation in Tokyo is out of control," said Norio Omagari, director of the Disease Control and Prevention Center under the National Center for Global Health and Medicine who is a member of an expert panel advising the metropolitan government on the crisis. Just a month ago, on July 20, the figure stood at 25.2 percent. But on Aug. 20, health experts put the figure at 9.5 percent as of Aug. 18, "an extremely low level" in the words of one panel member. However, the usage ratio of hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 patients with serious symptoms approached 90 percent, leading the experts to warn that if the current trend of surging infections continues, the capital's medical care structure will be overrun and lives that might have been saved could be lost.

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johnnyG said:

Wife said Kanagawa numbers were really high, too. Ishikawa has fallen back a little.

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