There are clear signs that a fifth wave of COVID-19 cases is hitting Japan just as the Tokyo Olympics is about to get under way.

The highly contagious Delta variant of the virus is spreading rapidly across the nation, making it urgent for public health authorities and medical institutions to prepare for a surge in patients.

Shigeru Omi, chief of a government COVID-19 task force, said in a statement on July 16 that the next two months will be the “most crucial stage” in Japan’s fight against the pandemic. Omi called on the public to avoid going on trips, especially traveling across prefectural borders.

But it is becoming increasingly tougher for policymakers to curb the growth in the number of people going out as the summer school holidays have started and the Tokyo Olympics is about to kick off.

To make matters worse, the government has committed a series of blunders in its responses to the pandemic, including allowing shortages of vaccines to disrupt the inoculation program and a bungled policy concerning requests to restaurants and bars to stop serving alcoholic drinks.

These slip-ups have delivered a heavy additional blow to the public's trust in the government’s policy for dealing with the health crisis.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga should have candidly apologized for these missteps and sent out an accurate and strong message so that his administration can recover its credibility and ability to tackle the situation effectively.

In a TV program on July 17, however, Suga suggested that he believes the number of new COVID-19 cases will start declining at the end of July.

“It is said that the number of new infections begins to decline when about 40 percent of the population have been vaccinated at least once,” he said.

His remark signaled shockingly complacent optimism. In Britain, where two-thirds of the adult population have received two vaccine shots, the number of cases has soared as COVID-19 restrictions have been eased. What are Suga’s thoughts about this grim reality?

Many people argue that there is no need to worry too much about the situation as long as the number of seriously ill patients is not surging. Indeed, the number of elderly patients including serious cases has dropped markedly due to vaccinations. But serious cases of younger patients are growing.

About half of the beds for seriously ill patients secured by the Tokyo metropolitan government are already occupied.

The total ratio of occupied beds for COVID-19 patients in Tokyo started picking up again in late June. There have been reports of public health centers struggling to find medical facilities capable of accepting patients that need to be hospitalized.

During the fourth wave of the pandemic in early spring, many severely ill patients died at home or in hotels rented by local governments to accommodate patients as they were not admitted into hospitals, particularly in the Kansai region around Osaka.

The disaster indicated the failure to learn some important lessons from a similar situation that occurred in Tokyo during the third wave earlier this year.

To accept COVID-19 patients, a medical institution needs to review the work assignments and schedules of the members of its medical staff. The experiences in the past year or so show that hospital beds prepared to treat COVID patients cannot necessarily be used immediately.

The government needs to act swiftly to take steps to respond to the resurgence, including measures to better monitor the conditions of infected people trying to recover at home or in hotel rooms.

Cooperation and the division of roles among hospitals have become more efficient and effective. But there are limits to what hospitals and local governments can do in coordinating efforts to tackle the new wave.

The Diet should have been engaged in more debate on additional systems and measures to boost the capacity of hospitals to care for COVID-19 patients. But the Suga administration refused to extend the regular Diet session when it ended in mid-June.

Olympic athletes and officials are coming to Japan in droves. It must be ensured that all COVID-19 patients can receive necessary medical treatment irrespective of their nationalities.

It is the obligation of the Olympic host nation that has decided to hold the mammoth international sporting event amid the pandemic.

--The Asahi Shimbun, July 20