Photo/Illutration A COVID-19 patient waits for admission to Heisei Tateishi Hospital in the capital's Katsushika Ward. (Momoko Ikegami)

Tokyo's medical care structure is so overwhelmed by the novel coronavirus pandemic that less than 10 percent of COVID-19 patients in the capital can be accommodated in hospitals for treatment.

“The situation in Tokyo is out of control,” said Norio Omagari, director of the Disease Control and Prevention Center under the National Center for Global Health and Medicine who is a member of an expert panel advising the metropolitan government on the crisis.

Just a month ago, on July 20, the figure stood at 25.2 percent. But on Aug. 20, health experts put the figure at 9.5 percent as of Aug. 18, “an extremely low level” in the words of one panel member.

However, the usage ratio of hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 patients with serious symptoms approached 90 percent, leading the experts to warn that if the current trend of surging infections continues, the capital’s medical care structure will be overrun and lives that might have been saved could be lost.

The daily average of new COVID-19 cases over the course of the past week reached 4,631, an 18-percent increase over the preceding seven-day period.

The average rate over the course of a week of positive COVID-19 test results was 24 percent as of Aug. 18, compared with 22.5 percent the previous week.

Omagari said that meant a large number of individuals are infected but not yet officially confirmed as such.

The Tokyo metropolitan government defines COVID-19 patients with serious symptoms as those requiring ventilators or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, also known as an ECMO lung bypass machine. There were 275 such patients as of Aug. 18.

But the health ministry also includes those in intensive care units in its figures. If such patients are included in the Tokyo tally to calculate the ratio of hospital beds in use for serious patients, the figure currently stands at 89.2 percent.

“There is already a shortage of beds where ventilators and ECMO machines can be used,” noted Masataka Inokuchi, vice chair of the Tokyo Medical Association and also a panel member.

Touching upon the low hospitalization rate, Inokuchi called on the authorities to grasp as soon as possible any worsening of symptoms among those recuperating at home so as to prevent more patients from developing serious symptoms.

The metropolitan government said it had secured a maximum of 6,406 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients.

However, one official said some beds could not be used, meaning there is no leeway to allow in more patients.

Metropolitan government officials have notified the 170 or so hospitals accepting COVID-19 patients to confirm whether the number of patients now receiving treatment is below the number of beds they initially said would be available.

(This article was written by Momoko Ikegami and Yoshitaka Unezawa.)

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