The coronavirus crisis that could not be exploited…Medical edition

When the coronavirus infection spread, the government requested all medical institutions to accept patients without classifying them by level (ability to respond to unknown infectious diseases).
For this reason, they even resorted to slapping them in the face with wads of cash, offering to provide a subsidy of nearly 10 million yen for each available bed if they set up a system to accept hospitalization.

However, admitting patients to many medical institutions means spreading the source of infection, which increases the risk of spreading the infection.
In times like these, I think the basic idea is to prepare a base hospital that specializes in corona patients and concentrate patients there to prevent the source of infection from spreading, but the government’s measures are completely different from this. The opposite is true.

Private hospitals do not provide medical care for charity, but rather conduct medical care for the purpose of making a certain amount of profit.
Therefore, they often do not have expensive systems in place to deal with unknown infectious diseases, and even if such systems are in place, the costs put pressure on management.
On the other hand, in the case of national and public hospitals, operational deficits are covered by taxes, so if a hospital has a system in place to deal with unknown infectious diseases, it will not go bankrupt even if it runs into a deficit.
On the other hand, if national and public hospitals cannot treat special illnesses that cannot be treated at private hospitals due to management issues, there is no point in pouring tax dollars into national and public hospitals.

Considering this background, when an unknown infectious disease like this one occurs, it is possible to select a base hospital from among national and public hospitals, gather specialists from public hospitals in each country, and also cooperate from private hospitals. Wouldn’t it be better to recruit doctors and have them provide intensive treatment, and only refer patients with complex conditions that cannot be treated there to advanced medical institutions such as university hospitals?
That way, medical institutions other than base hospitals can focus on treating patients who are not infected with the coronavirus.
All employees at national and public hospitals, including doctors, are civil servants, so it shouldn’t be difficult for the national or local government to decide on such an organization, and that’s not what taxpayers’ money is being used for. I wonder.

In the end, the coronavirus weakened before drastic measures could be taken, and coronavirus restrictions were lifted in May 2023.

With the lifting of coronavirus restrictions, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has sent a notice to each medical institution stating that refusing treatment on the basis of being a coronavirus patient is a violation of the duty to provide medical treatment,'' and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has issued a notice to each medical institution stating thatrefusal of treatment on the basis of being a coronavirus patient is a violation of the duty to accommodate patients.” It was partially forced on all medical institutions, regardless of the situation.
The coronavirus will not suddenly disappear with the lifting of coronavirus restrictions.
In medical institutions that do not have infection prevention measures in place, many medical workers are at high risk of becoming infected with the coronavirus, and if that happens, there will be no medical workers to treat diseases other than the coronavirus.
This method is no different from the training of the people to stand up against machine guns with bamboo spears during World War II, and the policies that politicians and bureaucrats consider have not changed over time, and they shows that we have learned nothing from history.

This pandemic was an opportunity to make major changes to Japan’s medical system, such as the state of national and private hospitals and the construction of a medical system that could respond flexibly to the pandemic, but we were not able to take advantage of it. I regret it.

Even after the coronavirus has passed, new infectious diseases may emerge, and we need to build a medical system that can respond to them as soon as possible.
We must not end the coronavirus by saying, “Once it gets to your throat, you forget how hot it is.”

I think the government’s current response is, “If it gets too hot, people will forget how hot it is.”