Over the past week, Japan has recorded just six deaths from COVID-19, the lowest since the start of the second wave of the pandemic in July 2020. Bloomberg reports.
Mortality in the country has practically reached zero, and the daily number of coronavirus infections has decreased from 25 thousand in August 2021 to 200 cases over the past three weeks. One of the reasons for the sharp decline in the incidence was mass vaccination.
As of Tuesday, December 7, about 97 million people – 77 percent of the population – are fully vaccinated in Japan. Among older people, immunization rates are approaching 100 percent: 92 percent of citizens aged 65 and over have completed the full course of vaccinations. However, many other developed countries that have launched similar campaigns to combat the virus are now seeing an increase in the number of infections and deaths.
Also, the Japanese widely use medical masks. Despite the fact that the Japanese government did not officially introduce the mask regime, citizens took the threat seriously and used personal protective equipment even when the infection rate was just beginning to decline.
However, despite Japan's success in reducing COVID-19 rates, the recent emergence of the omicron strain has forced the government to close again entry to foreigners and restrict the number of Japanese citizens who can return home. This happened three weeks after the previous restrictions on entry into the country were lifted.
On November 11, South Africa identified a strain under the code B.1.1.529, which was named the Greek letter “omicron”. The country's health minister said that the new version is easily tolerated by vaccinated patients, however, according to some reports, it can bypass the immunity of those who have recovered from other strains. A new version of the infection was recorded in a number of countries in Africa, Australia, Brazil, India, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and several European states. Earlier it became known that the omicron-strain was also identified in two Russians who arrived from South Africa.