The government looks set to repeat its mistakes

While the epidemiological impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been relatively moderate in East-Asian countries, the pandemic has significantly impacted on citizens’ lives and livelihoods, and Japan is no exception. In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan managed unprecedented quarantines and realized the difficulty of controlling COVID-19, finally recording a relatively high number of deaths per million in the Western Pacific region. However, scant research has highlighted the distinctive features of Japan’s reaction and the challenges encountered. To clarify these points and examine Japan’s first response to COVID-19, we performed a content analysis. Minutes of expert meetings were analyzed from multiple viewpoints, including epidemiology, health systems, border control, and health communication. The obscure evolution of the testing strategy, the usefulness of retrospective contact tracing, the rapid scientific risk assessment, a sluggish expansion of health system capacity and response in border control, and misunderstanding between risk communication and crisis communication are made evident by our analysis. Examining previous responses and gathering lessons learned in each country will improve global responses to COVID-19 and strengthen regional health security. Therefore, while investing in public health and ensuring transparency, Japan needs to clarify the previous decision-making process of each countermeasure towards COVID-19.

The 2020 summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo were postponed to July–September 2021 due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. While COVID-19 has emerged as a monumental health threat for mass gathering events, heat illness must be acknowledged as a potentially large health threat for maintaining health services. We examined the number of COVID-19 admissions and the Tokyo rule for emergency medical care, in Tokyo, from March to September 2020, and investigated the weekly number of emergency transportations due to heat illness and weekly averages of the daily maximum Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) in Tokyo in the summer (2016–2020). The peak of emergency transportations due to heat illness overlapped the resurgence of COVID-19 in 2020, and an increase of heat illness patients and WBGT has been observed. Respect for robust science is critical for the decision-making process of mass gathering events during the pandemic, and science-based countermeasures and implementations for COVID-19 will be warranted. Without urgent reconsiderations and sufficient countermeasures, the double burden of COVID-19 and heat-related illnesses in Tokyo will overwhelm the healthcare provision system, and maintaining essential health services will be challenging during the 2021 summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

On 31 December 2019, the Municipal Health Commission of Wuhan, China, reported a cluster of atypical pneumonia cases. On 5 January 2020, the WHO publicly released a Disease Outbreak News (DON) report, providing information about the pneumonia cases, implemented response interventions, and WHO’s risk assessment and advice on public health and social measures. Following 9 additional DON reports and 209 daily situation reports, on 17 August 2020, WHO published the first edition of the COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update (WEU). On 1 September 2023, the 158th edition of the WEU was published on WHO’s website, marking its final issue. Since then, the WEU has been replaced by comprehensive global epidemiological updates on COVID-19 released every 4 weeks. During the span of its publication, the webpage that hosts the WEU and the COVID-19 Operational Updates was accessed annually over 1.4 million times on average, with visits originating from more than 100 countries. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the WEU process, from data collection to publication, focusing on the scope, technical details, main features, underlying methods, impact and limitations. We also discuss WHO’s experience in disseminating epidemiological information on the COVID-19 pandemic at the global level and provide recommendations for enhancing collaboration and information sharing to support future health emergency responses.