Beds and ventilators are running out in hospitals in Japan’s second largest city, Osaka, which is being tested under the huge wave of new infections from coronavirus.
Exhausted doctors warn of “system collapse” and recommend postponing Olympic Games.
This area in western Japan, which has a population of 9 million, 7% of the country’s total population, is suffering from the fourth wave of the pandemic with one-third of covid-19 deaths in May in Japan being located there, as underlined by AMPE.
The speed with which Osaka’s health system is going to saturate underscores the challenges that Japan will face in hosting an international sporting event in two months, mainly as only half of Japanese doctors have been fully vaccinated against covid-19.

“To put it simply, the medical system is collapsing,” said Yuzi Tohda, director of Kindai University Hospital in Osaka.
“The highly contagious, British variant of the coronavirus and the declining attention have led to this explosive increase in the number of patients,” he explained.
Japan had avoided the big waves of the epidemic faced by other countries, but its fourth wave covid-19 has flooded Osaka with 3,849 new infections reported in a week. This is a fivefold increase compared to three months earlier.

Only 14% of the 13,770 patients with covid-19 in Osaka prefecture have been treated. By comparison, 37% of patients with coronavirus in the Tokyo area needed to be hospitalized. However until Thursday 96% of the available beds were occupied at the 348 Osaka Coronavirus Hospitals. As of March, 17 people have died from covid-19 outside a hospital in the prefecture.
“This variant strain can cause severe symptoms even in young people, and when they become seriously ill, people find it difficult to recover,” said Tosiaki Minami, director of Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital (OMPUH).
“I think until now many young people thought they were invincible. But this is not the case this time. “Everyone is equally at risk.”

The health staff “within its limits”
Minami said a supplier recently told him that stocks of propofol, a drug used to anesthetize patients to be intubated, were very low. At Tohda Hospital the respirators run out, which is vital for patients with severe covid-19.
Providing care to critically ill patients has a serious impact on healthcare staff, said Satsuki Nakayama, head of nursing at OMPUH Hospital. “I have staff in the intensive care unit that has reached its limits,” he added.
Yasunori Komatsu, head of a trade union in the region, said conditions were also difficult for nurses at local health centers.

“Some of them they do 100, 150, 200 hours of overtime and this has been happening for a year now (…) When they are on duty, they often go home at one in the morning just to wake them up on the phone at three or four “.
Medical personnel with experience from the Osaka battle against the coronavirus have a negative view of the Tokyo Olympics, which are scheduled to begin on July 23.

“The Olympics must stop because we have already failed to stop the influx of new executives from England and later the variant strain may enter from India, “warned Akira Takasu, head of the emergency department at OMPUH.
“70,000 or 80,000 athletes and people from all over the world will come to the country for the Olympics. “This could be the cause of another disaster in the summer.”

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