New Delhi: The news that two elderly passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship moored off Tokyo have died has brought to question Japan’s efficacy in containing the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, officially designated COVID-19.
Japan’s health ministry has held that of the two octogenarians who died on the ship, the man, aged 87, suffered from heart ailments and bronchitis. The 84-year-old woman’s official cause of death has been listed as ‘pneumonia’. Both had tested positive for COVID-19.
A total of 138 Indians, including 132 crew and six passengers, are on the ship. Six of them have been infected by the coronavirus.
Japan has well over half the known cases outside China. The latest deaths bring the country’s coronavirus toll up to three.
Besides those on the cruise liner and returnees brought home from the epicentre of the epidemic at Wuhan in China, about 70 cases of domestic infections have been confirmed in Japan, including 25 in Tokyo, the public broadcaster NHK has reported.
A health ministry official and another from the Cabinet Secretariat were confirmed to be infected with the virus after both had spent time working on the Diamond Princess. Three officials had previously been infected.
Japanese media has also reported that 29 people are in a serious condition, including one who had earlier tested negative for the virus.
The number of infections in Japan has more than doubled in the past week to 84, reported Bloomberg. The report highlights a worrying aspect of there being little to connect the outbreaks, which are ostensibly spread all over the country.
The ship
More than 620 of the 3,700 passengers on the cruise liner have been infected. While the ship has been quarantined since February 3, around 500 passengers began disembarking on Thursday while another 100 people were to leave for chartered flights to their homes in Australia, Canada, the US and Hong Kong, a health ministry official said.
All of these passengers will be required to face quarantines and tests put in place by the governments of their home countries, during the course of their travel and upon reaching.
Disembarked Japanese passengers, however, face no such restrictions, a decision that has sparked concern. Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases told Reuters that there should be no problem if people who had tested positive for the virus show no symptoms for 14 days.
Kobe University Hospital professor Kentaro Iwata, a specialist of infectious diseases, had posted a video to YouTube after touring the Diamond Princess ship. In it, he said the measures being taken to contain the spread were inadequate and that conditions on board were ‘chaotic’. Iwata told Bloomberg that Japan was suspended at a critical moment which could decide whether the disease would spread further. Shortly after the interview, he deleted the video – which by then had gone viral – and apologised.
To The Guardian, however, Iwata defended the criticisms he had made in the video, saying that passengers leaving the ship should at least be placed in a “soft quarantine” in case they start to develop symptoms.
Among other decisions that have been criticised is the initial move of keeping all the ship’s 3,700 passengers on board for two weeks to prevent the spread of the disease. During this time, reported Guardian, “members of the ship’s staff continued to prepare meals and perform other work duties, thereby allowing the virus to spread to colleagues and passengers.”
In a report for The Wire, Sribala Subramanian highlighted how one Binay Kumar Sarkar, who worked on the ship, had drawn attention to the gross inequities at play in the quarantined ship that increased risks for all but especially for the ship’s employees.
Also read: Indian Crew on Board the Diamond Princess Speaks out About Flawed Quarantine
Among those in Japan who have tested positive but had not been on the ship or to Wuhan are taxi drivers who possibly had interactions with infected people before they were diagnosed.
Japan has, meanwhile, received a rebuke from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over its largely ineffective management of quarantining the cruise liner.
Measures
While countries like India and Australia were quick to put visa restrictions in place to affect travel bans to stop the spread of the disease, Japan enjoyed a January of record-shattering tourism from China with restrictions only coming in on February 1, say reports.
The famous Japanese work ethic too is suspected to have made things worse, considering that while China’s neighbouring countries were keen to encourage employees to work from home, the Japan government did not call for any such measure, resulting in packed commutes.
Japan can scarce afford an outbreak in the scale of China, especially considering the Summer Olympics in August this year and the resultant boom in influx of tourists.
Pressure has thus mounted on the Shinzo Abe government, both from the country’s opposition and from outside, to regroup and take responsibility of a situation that could rapidly escalate out of control.
An editorial in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun says, “The government has repeatedly flip-flopped on how to deal with the situation” and notes that the virus testing systems at its disposal are inadequate.
Until now, the government has shown little indication of taking a line contrary to its present one, although in first signs of thaw, the country’s Japan Times has reported that the Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi has expressed regret for skipping a government meeting on the coronavirus outbreak in favour of a new year party.
Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga defended Japan’s efforts and told a news conference that after measures were put in place to isolate Diamond Princess passengers on February 5, the number of new infections was now almost at zero.
In a move to reassure the public, the health ministry also issued a statement in both English and Japanese highlighting the measures taken to make sure infections did not spread from the ship.
(With Reuters inputs)