Experts report challenges with COVID-19 in Japan

Japanese emergency medicine is starting to collapse amid dire shortages of protective gear and test kits that can quickly identify infected patients, putting medical workers at risk of infection and causing their refusal to treat suspected COVID-19 patients and even others suffering heart attacks and external injuries, representatives of the acute medicine said Friday.

The limited number of advanced and critical emergency centers are overburdened with the surging patients and risk of coronavirus infections because many other hospitals are increasingly turning away suspected patients, said Takeshi Shimazu, head of Japanese Association for Acute Medicine, and Tetsuya Sakamoto, who heads the Japanese Society for Emergency Medicine, to a joint video news conference.

We can no longer operate normally, and in that sense I say the collapse of emergency medicine has already started, Shimazu said.

I'm most concerned about a collapse of healthcare for the critically-ill patients.

Japan initially seemed to have controlled the outbreak by going after clusters of infections in specific places, the spread of the virus has outpaced this approach and most new cases are untraceable.

Experts say it's time to bolster testing to assess how widespread the infections actually are. Some experts say the infections in Japan are already far more than the number of cases released by the government.

Japan has about 12,400 cases and more than 300 deaths, according to the health ministry figures.