For Shinzo Abe’s government, 2020 was meant to be the year the global spotlight on the Olympic Games revealed a resilient, even resurgent Japan. Instead, as the archipelago has emerged as one of the largest coronavirus-affected clusters outside China , its handling of the crisis is drawing criticism, highlighting the systemic challenges. The country is a finely tuned piece of machinery that functions preternaturally well when things are going according to plan. But an unexpected googly, in this case the COVID-19 virus , can derail its usual efficiency.
The main case in point has been the Diamond Princess cruise ship , whose 3,700 passengers and crew had to endure a two-week quarantine while docked at Yokohama port, after it was discovered that a passenger who had disembarked earlier had tested positive for the virus. As new cases on the ship came to light every day, it was dubbed the world’s biggest floating petri dish. At least 700 confirmed COVID-19 cases have been linked to the ship.
The failures regarding the ship were manifold. To begin with, it took the Japanese authorities more than 72 hours to impose a lockdown after they were first notified of the initial case connected to the ship, with the result that for a day after the quarantine began, hundreds of passengers continued gathering for cruise activities and eating together. Moreover, throughout the two weeks, the 1,000-plus crew members were confined in tight quarters below deck. Eighty-five of these were eventually found to be infected, including a dozen Indians. Sick crewmembers slept in cabins with room-mates who continued their duties across the ship, undercutting the quarantine.
Eight public workers, who boarded the ship to support the quarantine, have also tested positive for COVID-19, and more may follow, which indicates that precautions to prevent the spread of infections on board were lacking. Several of the officials involved with testing and other tasks related to curtailing the outbreak were bureaucrats with little experience in managing infectious disease.
According to some reports, there were instances of officials failing to wear full protective gear. Most of the roughly 90 Health Ministry employees who visited the ship during the quarantine initially returned to their normal duties, although they have since been asked to quarantine themselves at home for 14 days.
Medical resources
Despite its technological advances, Japan’s authorities were unable to provide sufficient medical resources for testing. Many quarantined passengers complained of problems getting medical attention even after showing symptoms. While in neighbouring China, a purpose-built hospital for virus patients was constructed in a week, Japan was unable to find any alternative facility to house the cruise ship passengers despite fears that the infection was spreading on board.
Some countries, like the U.S., took citizens off the ship and repatriated them before the two-week quarantine period in Japan was up, as long as they underwent another, properly-supervised quarantine period after their return. But in Japan, close to 1,000 passengers who tested negative walked free on February 19, even though experts fear some of them could have been exposed and develop symptoms only later.
The Health Minister eventually revealed that 23 passengers had been released from the ship without taking a valid recent test and had travelled by public transport after disembarking. In fact, just two days after leaving the ship with a negative test result, a woman in her 60s tested positive for COVID-19.
The crisis has also highlighted the absence in Japan of an autonomous decision-making agency specialising in disease control, equivalent to the U.S.’s or China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Japan has a National Institute of Infectious Diseases, but it lacks independence from the Health Ministry and has been subject to hefty budget cuts in recent years.
What was meant to be a year of celebration is now imperilled. COVID-19 is on a collision course with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, scheduled for July-August. The possibility of the Games being cancelled cannot be ruled out, despite the government having spent nearly $30 billion on the preparations. The Olympics aside, the trajectory of the virus in Japan is emblematic of Tokyo’s inability to deal flexibly with a chaotic, changing environment, in part because of an over-reliance on algorithm-following bureaucracy and the accompanying tendency to be less than transparent in a crisis.
(Pallavi Aiyar is a journalist based in Tokyo)
