Photo/Illutration Health minister Katsunobu Kato responds to a question at the Aug. 19 session of the Lower House Health, Labor and Welfare Committee. (Koichi Ueda)

Health minister Katsunobu Kato indicated Aug. 19 the government would review its policy of requiring daily reports of all COVID-19 cases nationwide to ease the burden on medical institutions swamped by the latest and seventh wave of the pandemic.

With the recent surge in new infections, requiring doctors to submit the names and contact numbers of all patients they diagnose with COVID-19 to local public health offices has become a taxing problem not only for them, but also public health offices being flooded with the reports.

The policy of daily reports had been considered crucial because it allowed for an accurate grasp of the number of COVID-19 cases and provided health care officials with the information needed to decide who should be hospitalized.

However, experts advising the health ministry on the pandemic are reluctant to move away from the policy of reporting all cases.

Takaji Wakita, the head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases who chairs the expert panel, said after the Aug. 18 meeting that no member proposed doing away with the policy.

Health ministry officials are now considering having only designated medical institutions submit reports on COVID-19 cases. The same procedure is used for dealing with seasonal flu.

Because it will take time to decide how to designate medical institutions, health ministry officials concede that any change in reporting policy would likely only occur after the current wave of infections is brought under control.

Another alternative would be to only require reports for senior citizens or those with pre-existing medical conditions, given that they fall into the category of being at greater risk of developing serious symptoms.

But that would mean others who do not have to report their infections would be deprived of the opportunity to contact their local public health office in the event their condition suddenly worsened while they were recuperating at home.

Any change would lead to only estimates of the number of COVID-19 cases, making it more difficult to decide which areas should implement steps to deal with the infection trend.

(This article was written by Mirei Jinguji and Yuki Edamatsu.)

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