The Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications says that ambulance crew struggled to find hospitals to admit patients for the fourth consecutive week.
During the week of Jan 9-15, 52 fire department headquarters nationwide reported record-breaking emergency calls for a fourth straight week, reaching 8,161 amid a rise in COVID-19 infections, Fuji TV reported Wednesday. Nearly 30% of the total, or 2,340 cases, involved patients believed to be infected with the coronavirus.
By region, Tokyo logged the highest number of ambulance transportation cases with 3,403 patients facing difficulty in hospital admittance. Next was Osaka with 676 cases and Yokohama third with 541 cases. The government data reveals that urban areas are more likely to be affected by the burden on the emergency care system.
© Japan Today
18 Comments
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kurisupisu
In our local area it runs around 17-18
refusals until an admitting hospital is located
Feel sorry for the ambulance staff here
JeffLee
Remember when the govt built a few large-scale dedicated COVID facilities...and then shut them down after a few months? Boggles the mind.
sakurasuki
Japan the only developed nation where paramedic struggle to find hospital. This already happened for several years however nothing being done for this.
Japantime
Do people really need to go to a hospital for Covid?
Michael Machida
Japan has a thing about saving face and due to the fact that [ Heh, heh... ] they think are perfect in everything they do, cannot fix this issue after years of the same problems year after year.
How many more meetings do you need to have Japan?
smithinjapan
I guess all the pregnant women dying as ambulances try to find hospitals for them to deliver in, as well as people dying from heart attacks, strokes, and so on, just doesn't move the government enough to start listening to health care workers and actually DO something beyond praying it'll all go away. AND, they are even going backwards, announcing almost daily that they are planning to downgrade the virus and offer less free services towards prevention, and encouraging people to go out and engage in activities in mass crowds as they did before the pandemic, leading to this mess. They also need to allow paramedics to get proper medical training and administer minor procedures en route to hospitals. Simply putting a blanket on the people and holding their hands doesn't help in most cases unless you're one of the elderly who call the ambulance just to chat and then take a hospital bed for a month due to a cold.
ian
Not good, system getting strained again, might delay planned downgrading and relaxing of measures
kurisupisu
@sakurasuki
Even though the problem is easily remedied, it is the lazy LDP that is refusing to change the laws
Rodney
The obvious solution is to require ambulances to have a doctor on board.
shogun36
Well, in Japan, many hospitals close down on Sundays and some at night, as if injuries and sickness go to sleep sometimes.
Why would this come as a shock to people? They don't like customers.
ian
Try to understand the situation first
tigerjane
I put out on this site several times that you cannot put any stock to the number of people who are in the hospital in Tokyo. They turn people away all the time this is not new.
Design Monkey
@ Roy I was thinking the exact same thing!