Please Get Care Workers Tested for COVID-19 Under The Nippon Foundation Initiative [2021/04/27]
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has declared a third state of emergency for Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures, effective from April 25 to May 11, as the central and local governments struggle to contain a resurgence of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The general expectation is that the situation will get worse before it gets better.
Mr. Suga has embraced “self-help, mutual help, and public help” as his vision for society. “Things we can do for ourselves, we should first try to do ourselves. Then we should assist each other within our families and communities. Beyond that, the government will provide protection with a safety net,” he said in a policy speech before the Diet (Parliament) on October 26, 2020. Here, I would like to focus on “mutual help” in our battle against COVID-19.
As I announced at press conferences in January and February, The Nippon Foundation has been conducting free and regular polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for COVID-19, targeting about 560,000 caregivers and other essential workers at more than 23,000 elderly nursing homes in Tokyo and three neighboring prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba.
Older adults and people with underlying health conditions are more vulnerable to becoming severely ill or dying if they become infected with the coronavirus. Therefore, the foundation’s PCR testing program aims at identifying positive COVID-19 cases with mild or no symptoms among nursing home staff and thus preventing them from unknowingly transmitting the coronavirus to the elderly in their care.
According to statistics compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, nursing facilities accounted for more than 30% of 1,504 COVID-19 infection clusters reported in the country from January 13 to March 15, 2021－over three times the number at restaurants and drinking establishments.
I had hoped that nursing homes in the metropolitan area would take full advantage of free PCR testing, but I have seen few indications of local authorities guiding or encouraging them to do so.
The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on April 3 that Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward, which is considered to be the keenest among the capital’s 23 wards on getting people tested, said that out of some 1,500 nursing homes in the ward, only 403 have had their caregivers take free PCR tests administered by the ward government.
Nursing homes are said to be reluctant to have their staff undergo the PCR tests mostly out of concern that if the results come back positive, they would be hard pressed to recruit replacements and family members would have to undergo two-week quarantine, according to the Yomiuri.
Similarly, the Asahi Shimbun (April 5) and the Nikkei (April 6) warned of the slow progress in conducting PCR tests on caregivers at nursing homes across Japan.
In conducting the PCR tests, The Nippon Foundation works closely with Kinoshita Group that runs laboratories to analyze the saliva samples sent in. We also asked infectious disease experts to look into our PCR testing project and received feedback affirming the reliability of the tests.
Despite our strenuous efforts to promote testing, only 47,959 essential workers at 1,329 nursing homes (out of some 560,000 at more than 23,000 facilities) took our PCR tests from March 1 to April 11. Of these, 13 tested positive for the disease, accounting for 0.03% of the total.
Why don’t the governments of Tokyo and the three other prefectures advertise the existence of our free PCR tests and the support to be given in case of recipients testing positive?
May I suggest that, from a humanitarian point of view, the governors work more proactively to make sure caregivers at nursing homes in their prefectures undergo the free PCR tests being offered by The Nippon Foundation, which are an example of “mutual help” from the private sector? This is all the more urgent, given the slow pace of Japan’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout as indicated in the table below.
I firmly believe that to battle the pandemic, it is crucially important to balance the “public help” by the government with “mutual help” and “self-help” by individual citizens fairly and equitably.
Until the country makes substantial progress with vaccinations, let us work together to ride out this national crisis by realizing the prime minister’s vision.
COVID-19 vaccine doses administered, as of April 24, 2021
Total number of vaccination doses administered as compiled by “Our World in Data,” a team of Oxford University students and staff. Note that these figures are for single doses and may not equal the total number of people fully vaccinated if the vaccine requires more than one dose.
