COVID-19 pandemic in Japan | |
---|---|
Disease | COVID-19 |
Virus strain | SARS-CoV-2 |
Location | Japan |
First outbreak | Wuhan, Hubei, China |
Index case | Kanagawa Prefecture |
Arrival date | 16 January 2020 (4 years, 6 months, 1 week and 5 days) |
Confirmed cases | 16,047[1] |
Active cases | 6,767[1] |
Recovered | 8,920[1] |
Deaths | 678[1] |
The COVID-19 pandemic was first confirmed to have spread to Japan in January 2020.[2] Numbers have been recorded in each of the 47 prefectures except for Iwate. The country has seen over 10,000 sick people.
The Japanese government said its first outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started on 16 January 2020. The first was a person of Kanagawa Prefecture who had come back from Wuhan, China. The second outbreak was from Europeans and Americans from 11 March to 23 March.
The Japanese government has tried to stop the outbreak. On 30 January, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe created a national task force to help stop the outbreak.[3]
On 27 February, Abe stopped all Japanese elementary, junior high, and high schools until early April.[4]
On 7 April, Abe set a one-month state of emergency for Tokyo and the prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Osaka, Hyogo, and Fukuoka.[5] On 16 April, the declaration was extended to the rest of the country.[6]
The pandemic was a problem for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Hhe Japanese government and the International Olympic Committee tried to wait until 2021 before starting the Olympics.[7]
Medical experts and the news have did not like the Japanese government's actions. They said the government was not testing many people for COVID-19.[8] Medical experts said that the government should have used pneumonia surveillance numbers to help very sick patients.[9]
Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, politicians have come under immense fire for their handling of the crisis, with many health experts warning of Japan's low testing capabilities and slow government responses. By mid-April, Japan had only tested about 90,000 people, compared with more than 513,000 in South Korea, which has a population of 51 million, compared to Japan's 127 million.