Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world,
with a population of 125 million,
and the world's largest percentage of elderly persons,
at 41% of their population.
Japan has modern hospitals and medicine, and all the money
they need for testing and treatment for their people.
But, unlike many other wealthy countries in the West,
the Japanese government has complete control of their health care facilities,
and can order them to follow any standards deemed necessary.
In February 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan gave their hospitals orders to
require minimum standards for any admissions due to airborne disease.
Any patients admitted to Japanese hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic
must have experienced all of the following for four days,
or two days for the elderly or persons with chronic conditions:
- A 37.5℃ (99.5℉) fever
- Extreme fatigue
- Breathing difficulties
Anyone not meeting these standards would be turned away at the door, and sent home to recover.
These basic triage standards kept Japanese hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients,
thus protecting those truly vulnerable to airborne disease - the elderly and otherwise weak.
Covid-19, the same virus that has resulted
in orders of magnitude more deaths in other countries,
has caused only 52%
of a normal year's cold season deaths in Japan.
They have largely maintained a low number of deaths per case:
And so now, what has happened is that Japan has cases like any other country:
But those cases have not resulted in a substantial rise in deaths, with only
as many as 621 per day
on as many as 261,252 daily cases,
for a total of 74,694 deaths,
or 18 per 100,000 of their population:
Compare that to the United States, with just over 2.5 times Japan's population,
where as many as 5,369 have died per day
on as many as 1,231,770 daily cases,
for a total of 1,074,502 deaths,
or 98 per 100,000 of their population:
As of May 1, 2021, 91% of United States Covid-19 deaths occurred in a medical care facility,
with only about 50,000 occurring outside a hospital, comparable to a normal cold-and-flu season
in the US, at 57,000. It is possible that if US healthcare facilities
were required to institute policies like Japan's,
to turn away patients in order to maintain their populations at manageable levels at all times,
that the US could have experienced a Covid-19 death rate as low as Japan's.
The data shows the results of different countries with different policies.
And that data shows that protecting the elderly, and thus existing hospital populations,
is one of the best strategies to minimize deaths to airborne disease, and
to experience normal cold-and-flu seasons.
To not properly triage, and turn away prospective patients
for not meeting whatever standards are necessary
to keep the hospital population within its capacity,
is deadly malpractice.
