Tokyo, 24 August, /AJMEDIA/
Japan will change its daily coronavirus reporting rules by limiting it to the elderly and others at risk of developing severe symptoms in a bid to lessen the burden on hospitals as the seventh wave of the pandemic persists, government sources said Wednesday.
The government is also considering easing border restrictions and recategorizing COVID-19 as a seasonal flu if its severity lessens. Under Japan’s infection laws, the virus is treated in a way that authorizes the widest range of countermeasures including requests for the patients to stay at home.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is set to explain the change on reporting rules in the afternoon.
A government official said Kishida will say the policy shift will not be uniform throughout the country, but will be implemented at the discretion of each municipality.
The government is also considering giving each municipality the option to stop reporting all coronavirus cases when medical institutions are under heavy strain from a surge in the number of patients.
Medical facilities are currently required by law to report COVID-19 cases to the government by entering the data into a system shared with public health centers.
But with the prevalent Omicron variant having less risk of causing severe illness compared with previous strains, some government officials have questioned the need to log every case.
Moving forward, infection trends will be monitored by reporting only those hospitalized or at high risk, with doctors no longer required to log patients who are young and at low risk of developing severe symptoms.
The health ministry is also considering establishing fixed-point monitoring by collecting data from designated medical institutions, but the system is expected to take some time to come into operation.
