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Japan is in the grip of the worst phase yet in the novel coronavirus pandemic in terms of daily fatalities as the government confirmed an influenza epidemic, the first in three years, is now also raging.

The latest figure for deaths from COVID-19 on Dec. 27, as tallied by The Asahi Shimbun, came to 438. This compares with 347 set at the height of the seventh wave of infections.

The daily average of deaths for the week ending Dec. 27 came to 313.7, a roughly 1.5-fold increase over the past two weeks. The daily average exceeded 200 on Dec. 12.

A panel of experts advising the health ministry on measures to combat the public health crisis met on Dec. 28 and noted that daily deaths will likely remain high for some time to come as the cause of the surge remains unclear.

They called for a more detailed analysis of the ages of patients newly found to have COVID-19, the rate of vaccinations and the cause of death to determine what was leading to the increase.

Other possible factors cited behind the sudden increase in novel coronavirus-related deaths concerned a government decision to no longer require a detailed count of all COVID-19 cases as well as a crunch on local medical institutions.

Health ministry officials said the number of new COVID-19 cases had increased by about 1.1 times over the most recent week, a decline in the rate over past weeks.

There were 215,966 new cases nationwide on Dec. 28, an increase of 9,522 over the previous Wednesday. But there were also 412 deaths on Dec. 28, the second highest number after the record of the previous day.

Health ministry officials also warned that an influenza epidemic had developed, the first in three years. No flu epidemic was reported during the novel coronavirus pandemic that first struck Japan in early 2020, but officials are now alarmed by a simultaneous increase in COVID-19 and influenza cases.

The average number of influenza patients at about 5,000 medical institutions around the nation for the week of Dec. 19-25 stood at 1.24 per medical institution, according to the health ministry.

A flu epidemic is considered to have begun if the average number of patients per medical institution exceeds a benchmark of 1.0.

(This article was written by Kai Ichino and Yuichiro Yoneda.)

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