A COVID-19 vaccination site at a university campus in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward on May 13 (Ryo Ikeda)
Japan will likely need to issue four more emergency declarations by April 2022 if its COVID-19 vaccination program does not significantly pick up the pace, experts warn.
Researchers have crunched the numbers and are now calling on the government to inoculate citizens four times faster than the current speed to bring the pandemic under control.
The study was done by Yasuharu Tokuda, who heads the Muribushi Okinawa Center for Teaching Hospitals, and Toshikazu Kuniya, an associate professor of mathematical biology at Kobe University.
“The results of simulations may vary depending on other anti-virus measures, but the speed of inoculations still needs to be greatly accelerated,” Tokuda said. “I want the government to swiftly create an environment to realize that.”
May 15, 2021
Japan must significantly ramp up the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations or face the prospect of up to four more states of emergency by the end of next March, according to projections by two researchers.
The authors of the study, Dr. Yasuharu Tokuda, director at Muribushi Okinawa Center for Teaching Hospitals, and Toshikazu Kuniya, associate professor of system informatics at Kobe University, made the projection based on a scenario under which an average of 220,000 jabs are given daily roughly the pace when they were working on the study last month.
At that pace, it would take 1,000 days to inoculate the country’s 110 million residents age 16 and over with two doses each. As of May 13, 5,593,436 shots had been given for an average of about 65,000 jabs per day since the start of the rollout on Feb. 17. Around 286,000 jabs were given on Thursday, bringing the average for the preceding week to about 193,000, as the country begins to ramp up the pace of its inocul
Slow COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Tokyo could mean no Olympic and Paralympic Games
Researchers in Japan have warned that Tokyo s Olympic and Paralympic Games, which is set to start in July 2021, may need canceling if the rollout of vaccination to protect against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues at the slow pace it is now. Vaccine rollout has been slow in Japan, compared to other developed countries, says Yasuharu Tokuda from Muribushi Okinawa Center for Teaching Hospitals and Toshikazu Kuniya from Kobe University.
The team s predictive analysis of the epidemic in Tokyo forecast that if vaccination rollout continues at the current pace, then the maximum daily number of new infections with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) – the agent that causes COVID-19 – would reach almost 8,000 in the city during August of 2021.