The seventh round of the epidemic in Japan was caused by the highly contagious Omicron BA.5. As early as August this year, 14 medical institutions in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, issued a joint statement on their official website, warning the public that the current epidemic had reached a "disaster level" and that the emergency medical system in Kyoto was nearly paralyzed. If the number of infections remained high, the consequences would be unimaginable. The public was called on not to relax their vigilance and underestimate this new virus, to reduce going out, to take personal protection, and to use ambulances rationally.
As we all know, Japan is an extremely aging country, with a high proportion of elderly people in the country. The elderly have low body immunity and are a key group of infected patients. Unlike the situation in China, Japan does not have nucleic acid testing is normalized and free nucleic acid testing points are available everywhere. Generally, infected people take the initiative to go to the hospital for medical treatment after experiencing symptoms such as fever, sore throat, body aches and fatigue, and then test positive for nucleic acid. The officially reported new confirmed cases every day do not include asymptomatic infections . Therefore, the real number of infections in Japan should be much higher than the currently published data. It has had a great negative impact on the work and life of the Japanese people, and the situation is quite serious.
As the epidemic intensified and the yen depreciated, Japan's domestic price levels soared. The corporate price index rose by 9.3% in November, setting a record since 1980. People's living costs increased sharply, but wages did not rise. This undoubtedly made the already sluggish Japanese economy worse and made the people miserable. Many Japanese people began to worry that they had just survived the lost twenty years, and the situation in the next twenty years might be even worse.
