Here are excerpts from three articles that describe the coronavirus contact tracing efforts in Japan:
A region in Japan launched its own coronavirus fight. It’s now called a ‘model’ in local action (March 22, 2020)
Under the Health Ministry’s approach at the time, not everyone who had been in close contact with an infected person was being tested. Many such people were simply told to stay home and monitor their health. The hospital in Yuasa had been closed to outpatients after the tests, but Nisaka and his health department knew they needed it working again, and fast. Everyone who might have been infected needed to be tested. Officials started to track down everyone who could have been in contact with the doctors — nurses, part-time staff, patients, family members, even workers at small businesses supplying goods to the hospital. “It was hard,” the health department chief, Nojiri, said. “The first challenge was to grasp the entire picture, which took time. Just to see how many people to target — it is not as though there were directories [of how to find them].” Staff at public health centers interviewed people to find out who could have been in contact with the virus. It took three days to trace everyone and up to 11 more days to get specimens for testing, she said. The list had swelled to roughly 470 people, an enormous number at a time when Japan was doing only a few hundred tests a day, outside the Diamond Princess cruise ship under quarantine in Yokohama. Medical staff in Wakayama and Osaka worked around the clock to analyze test results. By Feb. 25, everyone had been tested, and 10 more coronavirus patients were found.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-coronavirus-wakayama/2020/03/22/02da83bc-65f5-11ea-8a8e-5c5336b32760_story.htmlThis may be the tip of the iceberg”: Why Japan’s coronavirus crisis may be just beginning (March 28, 2020)
Japan began testing individuals with coronavirus symptoms — and not only those with a history of travel to Hubei province — at the discretion of local governments around February 12. The government then created a specialized team of public health and medical experts to identify and isolate infection clusters. Whenever a hospital confirms a new case, the government dispatches teams of medical and data experts to cooperate with local governments to locate and test anyone who has been in contact with the infected individual. Oftentimes as a result, the corresponding local facilities are closed down, such as a senior care facility in Aichi prefecture that was associated with an infection cluster.
https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-explainers/2020/3/28/21196382/japan-coronavirus-cases-covid-19-deaths-quarantineJapan May Have Beaten Coronavirus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing. But How? (May 25, 2020)
An early grassroots response to rising infections was crucial. While the central government has been criticized for its slow policy steps, experts praise the role of Japan’s contact tracers, which swung into action after the first infections were found in January. The fast response was enabled by one of Japan’s inbuilt advantages — its public health centers, which in 2018 employed more than half of 50,000 public health nurses who are experienced in infection tracing. In normal times, these nurses would be tracking down more common infections such as influenza and tuberculosis. “It’s very analog — it’s not an app-based system like Singapore,” said Kazuto Suzuki, a professor of public policy at Hokkaido University who has written about Japan’s response. “But nevertheless, it has been very useful.” “Many people say we don’t have a Centers for Disease Control in Japan,” said Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor of infection control at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, citing a frequently held complaint about Japan’s infection management. “But the public health center is a kind of local CDC.”
https://time.com/5842139/japan-beat-coronavirus-testing-lockdowns/
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