New wave of infections threatens to collapse Japan hospitals

[grantcart]

Source: Associated Press



New wave of infections threatens to collapse Japan hospitals

By MARI YAMAGUCHI and YURI KAGEYAMAApril 18, 2020 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — Hospitals in Japan are increasingly turning away sick people as the country struggles with surging coronavirus infections and its emergency medical system collapses.

In one recent case, an ambulance carrying a man with a fever and difficulty breathing was rejected by 80 hospitals and forced to search for hours for a hospital in downtown Tokyo that would treat him. Another feverish man finally reached a hospital after paramedics unsuccessfully contacted 40 clinics.

The Japanese Association for Acute Medicine and the Japanese Society for Emergency Medicine say many hospital emergency rooms are refusing to treat people including those suffering strokes, heart attacks and external injuries.


Read more: https://apnews.com/9140ddd7283d534d8464778d9c4bd92a

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If Japan, with all of its advantages of a highly structured homogeneous society, isn't ready to re open then we are weeks away.

Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, all much smaller and easier to organize than the US are already facing a second wave:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/21213787/coronavirus-asia-waves-hong-kong-singapore-taiwan

[SouthernCal_Dem]

1. The US truly is screwed thanks to GOP governors and lawmakers

If this kind of second surge is happening in Japan, just imagine what will happen here with our incompetent leadership and lack of testing.

How can people even think about trying to "open up" the economy at this point?

[RussBLib]

11. if there was truly karma

those GOP states with no restrictions and the Dem states bearing protests would suffer large spikes in infections.

And of course, the leaders of the protests would come down with a really bad case.

Alas.....

[SunSeeker]

2. South Korea has managed to stay open AND not suffer a second wave.

How? Massive unrestricted amounts of rapid testing, followed up with contact tracing and targeted quarantines. It's not rocket science. You just need a competent, committed and caring federal government. Alas, we don't have that.

Japan got into trouble because Abe played a reckless game for weeks, pretending that everything was fine, so that they would not have to reschedule the Summer Olympics. Of course, it didn't work, and they had to push the Olympics off into the summer of 2021. Now, even that date seems too optimistic. With Japan's huge percentage of people over 65 (the most in the world, at 28.2%, https://www.prb.org/countries-with-the-oldest-populations/#the-top-50-countries-with-the-largest-percentage-of-older-adults) , this is going to get horrific before it gets better. God help them.

[Cetacea]

3. The same man who told his people to smile away the radiation n/t

[SunSeeker]

4. Ug. Really? He said that? No wonder his approval rating is so low. nt

[soryang]

10. Abe and the LDP want to use the crisis to amend the constitution

they telegraphed their desire to expand the prime minister's military powers in the event the Diet was unable to meet because of a "national emergency" a couple of months ago. His current posture now is that he can only encourage people to stay home, but doesn't have the authority to order people to stay home. In addition to expanding Japan's power to go to war, he wants to enhance the power of the Prime Minister's office.

[Canoe52]

5. Buckle up folks, this ain't going to be over in May or June or July...

With the walking dead already out and about (only three weeks of lockdown in MI!) it’s going to turn into a regular shitshow.
Might have a nice Christmas if enough of these fuckers kill themselves off and it finally dawns on them they might not be handling it in the quite the right way. No, fuck that, that takes self awareness, way too much to ask of them.

[yaesu]

6. Japan has the oldest population in the world, Italy wasn't far behind, it could be devastating

to them.

[bucolic_frolic]

7. Build the Wave

MAGAts to the front of the line!

[betsuni]

8. This isn't new.

http://japantoday.com/category/national/cases-of-emergency-patient-refusal-by-hospitals-rise-to-over-16000

A woman living down the street from me went into labor in the evening and the ambulance sat there for hours until they found a hospital that would take her. There was a scandal about that when the death toll of pregnant women got too high. Nationalized health care isn't perfect. I was shocked when we visited my mother-in-law on the weekends hospitalized at a general hospital and the whole place except for the ER was shut down. We went through a dark deserted hospital and the section where the hospitalized people were was staffed by only a few female nurses. Women are paid less: supermarkets, hospitals, everywhere. Japan depends on unpaid women.

[Igel]

9. When was their first wave?

Back in March, when it "peaked" at 4 deaths/day?

April 4th or 5th, at 8/day?

This is wave 3 or wave 1, depending how you count.

And that's what'll happen after lockdown--you either shut everything down so everybody's safe, or you let people work. EMTs in NYC have over 15% out sick--if this were a meat packing plant we'd say to shut it down. Esp. those who don't like meat.

"Flattening the curve" isn't about keeping you from getting sick. It's to keep hospitals from running out of capacity. The longer you flatten the curve, the longer the pandemic will continue--until there's a vaccine, if there's a vaccine, or herd immunity, if antibodies confer protection and are long-lasting enough. That's the logic of a pandemic. Everything else is fiction and socially constructing a fantasy world. Antivirals may help--or not, it depends on whether they diminish the severity of a person's response to the point that insufficient antibodies are produced to confer immunity (again, if they do).

And, agreeing with the experts, it's unlikely anything done could have stopped its spread. The countries that we should have emulated? Now they're cases for what not to emulate.

What's interesting is that I haven't heard what the successful countries are still doing. First two weeks? Sure. Next two months, not so much.

[Baclava]

12. They were living on borrowed time, densely packed populations will still get hit

Eventually

Time is on the side of the virus