Panic in the Pacific: A tiny Okinawan island creates a medical "emergency"
Miyako City (pop 55,000) on Miyakojima in Okinawa Prefecture (pref pop: 1.45 million) is a picturesque Pacific island that relies on tourism, so to make people feel welcome, the local government insists that everyone masks up at all times, even on the beach.
And it looks like almost everyone does.
However, the island has recently been having a problem.
Miyakojima’s medical “state of emergency” due to Covid’s rapid spread
This “emergency” led to Miyako Hospital suspending in-person diagnosis and non-emergency surgeries for at least 2 weeks. So how bad is the virus situation?
(Miyakojima’s) 7-day average case rate per 100,000 is 1222.88, 1.5 times higher than Okinawa Prefecture’s (733.41), which itself is the highest among the nation’s prefectures.
So that’s about 1.2% of the population testing positive each day. But imagine how much worse it would be if they weren’t wearing masks on the beach! Of course, the governor of Okinawa concluded that the problem is actually due to insufficient masking and called for school kids to wear masks during extracurricular activities.
And the governor of Shimane, Japan’s Most Annoying Governor, had this to say when criticising the national government’s recent recommendation to unmask outside when 2 or meters away from anyone else: “Evidence (that Covid is) not just a cold or flu is Okinawa’s current situation. It’s a reality even a fool could understand.”
So Miyako Hospital must be overwhelmed with Covid patients then?
Due to the spread of the virus, the Miyako area has gone from medical phase 3A to 4 and increased the number of beds reserved for Covid patient from 22 to 55. In Miyako Hospital, which has 40 of these beds, there were 5 Covid patients as of noon on the 9th. None was severe.
Huh!? How can you have a medical emergency with only 5 mild/moderately ill patients? Why is this even in the news? And why am I writing a blog post about this?
“24 nurses are off work including those for Covid-related reasons.”
There you go. The reason I’m bringing this storm in a teacup to your attention is that it perfectly encapsulates Japan’s Covid response: implement ineffective measures (masks, contact isolation) to “stop the spread” of a virus with a low morbidity/mortality rate and then declare an emergency and call for even more masking when the measures don’t work (or as in this case, backfire) despite the noticeable lack of sick people.
The below graph shows the number of nurses at major medical facilities who were off work for Covid-related reasons in Okinawa from January to May this year [Source]. I can’t think of a better way to guarantee constant disruption and staff shortages in medical facilities than having healthy nurses stay at home for 10 days (it was previously 14) because they happen to have been in the same room as a Covid case.
And as for Covid being different from the flu, the governor of shimane has a point: the flu would be expected to kill a few more Okinawans under 60. Below is data for this year.
Oh I forget to mention this is the fourth time Miyako Hospital has suspended services “due to Covid”. These incidents didn’t occur much in past flu seasons since the contacts of flu cases don’t isolate (and people aren’t tested for asymptomatic flu). And until the Japanese treat Covid like the flu rather than like Ebola, we can expect more “emergencies” for the foreseeable future.