気ままなリライト５８

コロナ医療、正常化へ前進　受け皿拡大には課題

When the impact of Covid-19 as a bogeyman to frighten the bejesus out of the public has died down in many developed nations across the globe, without a plausible cause for the Japanese government to stick to its fear-mongering policy, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has decided to give in to pressure from the public sentiment defying a special privilege the authority is keeping granting to Covid-19 by downgrading the Covid’s classification from Class II to Class V. What has procrastinated the downgrading is more likely to stand in the way of the smooth transition from the lingering image of a bogeyman instilled into many people’s minds to the image of an infectious disease with a non-serious health risk.

Downgrading the Covid classification from Class II to Class V is a blessing for people favoring critical thinking and individual autonomy over blind deference. With a Covid-19 put in a lower classification in the level of health risks, government-designated hospitals for Covid-19 patients will be phased out. In hospitals and health-care clinics available to flu patients across the country, indiscriminate treatment will be available to Covid-19 patients, without being forced to be quarantined or admitted to designated hospitals through the instructions from public health centers. Covid-related subsidies will be tapered off by stages as overprotection for Covid-19 patients will not be justified.

The bureaucratic inertia or procrastination is more likely to set in when the timing of downgrading comes to an important issue the government should tackle with as an unwillingness to break the new-found habit under the condition of the “new normal” designed for the pandemic is growing among people favoring herd mentality over personal accountability. Wrapped themselves in a cocoon of Covid-prioritized lifestyle, without thinking rationally about what risk they are willing to tolerate, those risk-averse people are more prone to stick to the rules they are asked to follow by authority figures, regardless of whether they are grounded in scientific evidence and unbiased demographic research data or not. Policymakers are still required to beef up the illusionary security for people less immune to information manipulation. That gives policymakers an excuse for not reinvestigating or changing their Covid-related precautionary measures, even though more information is coming to light about how negligible health risk more infectious Covid-19 variants than the flu are posing to the healthy public.

A gradual shift in downgrading from Class II to Class V has indicated a lack of sense of crisis. The official data showed that Class II was more than what Covid-19 variants deserved in the classification of infectious diseases. According to the data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, a decline in a chance of developing serious symptoms was dramatic among elderly Covid-19 infected patients in the period between July and August 2022, compared with that in the period between July and October 2021. When keeping Covid-19 variants in the undeserved class is generating unnecessary chaos in the medical sector, such a situation is not being handled with the sense of crisis the medical authorities are supposed to have to offer the medical treatment equal to all patients without delay. Some people sticking to their vested interests would wonder how they could live with variants of Covid-19 robbed of its privilege.