22 June 2022, Wednesday — Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

Day 786 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01
Japan covid-related topics in NHK’s 7am news bulletin today:
Nothing directly covid in these headlines (except for the extradition of the leader of the group that was making false claims for covid subsidies) and I had to get the numbers from the websites.

Photo 2a
[Taken from the NHK website]
15384 new cases confirmed [so this is slighty up vs….]
[vs. 15331 for the same day last week. 17039 the same day two weeks ago.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.
No new daily case records (probably).

Nowhere with five digits
Quadruple figures in 4 prefectures:
Okinawa, Osaka, Aichi, Tokyo
30 prefectures in triple figures
13 prefectures in double figures
Nowhere in single figures

Tokyo on 1963 [vs. 1528 same day last week, quite a bit up]
Osaka on 1511 [vs. 1590 same day last week]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 9
[Border testing was relaxed even as double the number of people are being allowed into the country from June 01.]

Photo 02b
[Taken from the NHK website]
The total of current active serious cases stands at 34, down 7 vs. the previous day.

17 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 31076

Total recorded cases at 9176804
Recovered cases at 8993402 (around 15,000 recovered cases up from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 152,326 (down around 20 vs the previous day).
Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 1.65%.

Photo 03
So there was a big piece on an area that was pointed out in the recent covid review report as being inadequate: HER-SYS, which was meant to be the centralized admin management system for covid infections.
[The TL:DR is that it was massively bureaucratic, placing a huge admin burden on the welfare centers while not providing the government with the real-time data it needed to track the pandemic.]

Photo 04
And why is that, you ask? Well, for a start, there were 150* data points that needed inputting for each patient, taking a minimum of 30 minutes per patient.
[*The article I am double-checking this with says 120, but I am pretty sure he said 150 on the news. I have leant quite heavily on a machine translation of the original article in Japanese, which I will provide in the comments.]

Photo 05
This led to a huge amount of input errors and meant that the infection situation could not be analyzed correctly.

Photo 06
So. in response to criticism in the covid review that says that HER-SYS lacked adequate functionality at first, the govt. is moving to introduce a replacement system [by October, in anticipation of any resurgence in cases].

Photo 07
Here is a guy from Tokyo Kita ward’s welfare center standing among the boxes of paper-based patient reports…

Photo 08
…that had been faxed in from hospitals and which it was then the job of the welfare center to input into HER-SYS.

Photo 09
Checking the infection reports and contacting patients directly to get info from them directly took about 30 minutes per person.

Photo 10
This input work was being done by welfare centers in parallel with their task for getting covid patients hospitalized and was a huge burden on the staff.

Photo 11
As cases increased, welfare centers couldn’t keep up with the input work.
However, they didn’t receive any guidance from the government as to what parts of the info they should prioritize entry of and what parts they could skip.
[So they carried on plugging away, getting further behind which affected both hospitalization and other arrangements and meant that the govt. wasn’t getting real-time info.]

Photo 12

The incredibly exasperating thing is that the MHLW had already been developing a rapid data gathering system to deal with pandemics (FFHS) [that had been developed in the wake of previous outbreaks such as H1N1 influenza since 2013].

[FFHS = For Fucking Hell’s Sake, I guess]

Photo 13

FFHS only had 18 data entry points for hospitals and the welfare centers to deal with.

Photo 14

And had OCR capability to read handwritten forms if faxed in.

Photo 15

The system was designed to link up with prefectural authorities to give everybody realtime info.

Photo 16

And for several years, they had been holding drills with it with several prefectures.

Photo 17

According to the research team, in February of last year, when the spread of the new coronas began, they received an email from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare instructing them to modify the system for the new coronas, but no further communication was received [and the system was never implemented].

[Bonus stuff that I cut the photos for: Professor Takashi Okumura of the Kitami Institute of Technology, a former official of the MHLW who was in charge of developing the system, said, “Based on lessons learned in the past, we had prepared a system with the solution to problems that arise in the field in mind, and if the system had been introduced, we would have been able to reduce the burden on the field and efficiently consolidate patient information from the first infected person in Japan to the last in the pandemic.

Photo 18

Hokkaido is one of the prefecture’s that conducted drills with FFHS in the past, and decided to introduce it independently in August of last year.

Photo 19

The technical supervisor of the Hokkaido Department of Health and Welfare points out how FFHS is timely and easy to use.

Photo 20

The system allows rapid sharing of information such as

Patient status, Vaccination history, Route of infection, types of mutant strains.

Photo 21

Yoshinori Hitomi, technical supervisor of the Hokkaido Department of Health and Welfare, says FFHS is the shizzle.

Photo 22

The panel reviewing covid response singled out HER-SYS for criticism:

“The core information needed for developing countermeasures was not provided to the government and experts, and the delay in digital reform was serious.

Photo 23

In response, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) has decided to introduce a new system for the following infectious diseases to local governments and other organizations nationwide starting this October.

Photo 24

In order to reduce the burden of inputting information, the new system will allow patients to input some information themselves using smartphones, and is also considering the introduction of OCR technology, which will automatically read handwritten faxes reporting infection.

Photo 25

The MHLW wants to respond to the next infectious disease by introducing the system in advance.

Photo 26

Dr. Tetsushu Kusaba, President of the Japan Primary Care Association, who served as a member of the government’s expert panel examining measures against the new coronas, said, [“Of course it is important to respond after a crisis occurs, but it is also extremely important to build up preparations during normal times and establish a system that can be immediately transferred when a crisis occurs. It is a basic premise that a system for inputting information on infected persons, etc., should also be prepared in advance,” he said.]

Regarding the fact that another system had been developed by the national research team since 2013 but was not fully utilized this time, he asked, “Why couldn’t the department in charge at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare make a recommendation when the new corona actually spread?”

Photo 27

“It means that something that had been under preparation for 6 years did not end up being used, and I think it is necessary to verify the whole process to establish whether or not consideration was given to whether or not [FFHS] could have been utilized”

Photo 28

NHK asked several MHLW departments who were involved in the introduction of HER-SYS why FFHS was not used.

This comment was typical: We were not aware of the research team’s system because we hadn’t received any reports about it.

Photo 29

The Tuberculosis Infectious Diseases Division of the MHLW, which was in charge of the research, stated, “We cannot clearly explain whether or not the Research Team’s system was shared with the department in charge of HER-SYS, because we were so busy dealing with the unprecedented corona outbreak that we did not keep records. [However, unless we could confirm that the research group’s system could be operated without problems throughout the country, it would have been difficult to introduce the system as is.]”