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 The city of Asahikawa, about 140 km (87 miles) north of Sapporo on
the northern island of Hokkaido, is reeling from infection clusters
at two hospitals and a care home. By Sunday, the number of cases
recorded on the island was more than 10,000, and Asahikawa had
accounted for 16% of the 256 deaths.
It prompted the government to announce a plan on Monday to send
nurses from Self Defense Forces to the region and western metropolis
of Osaka to help fight the outbreak.
"Hokkaido is a place where due to the climate conditions people tend
to have the heater on very high and in very closed spaces as well,"
said Haruo Ozaki, president of the Tokyo Medical Association.
"In places such as Tokyo and Osaka, it will also be getting colder
from now. When we add this coldness factor, it shows that we need to
express a lot more caution or we could face a further spread of
contagion."
Asahikawa, a city of 340,000 people, holds the record for Japan's
lowest recorded temperature of -41C (-41.8F) in 1902. Researchers
have warned that airborne transmission of the virus increase when
people spend more time in closed-up rooms breathing dry air.
"Asahikawa and including Sapporo are in a various serious condition
in terms of the pandemic," said Dr. Yasutaka Kakinoki at Asahikawa
City hospital. The burgeoning caseload has brought the health system
in Asahikawa to "near collapse", he said.
Asahikawa Kosei Hospital has been the site of 224 infections of
patients and staff, prompting the facility to turn away all but the
most critical cases.
Yoshida Hospital, a private facility in the city, has 184 cases and
has had difficulty transferring patients to other hospitals.
"It's a difficult situation we are facing," Asahikawa mayor Masahito
Nishikawa said in a recent online briefing, asking citizens to avoid
the city's major hospitals.
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NO HARBINGER?
As infections surged in recent weeks, neighboring city Sapporo and Osaka, on
Japan's main island Honshu, opted out of a domestic tourism campaign, but those
two cities will require "some sort of lockdown" to control the outbreak, said
Kenji Shibuya, director of the Institute of Population Health at King's College
in London.
Hokkaido was first to declare a state of emergency earlier this year amid the
first wave of the pandemic and it was also largely spared a second wave that
struck Tokyo and the large population centres in the summer.
While winter cold and dry air have been factors in Hokkaido's COVID-19 clusters,
a lack of aggressive testing and containment have also exacerbated the outbreaks
in Asahikawa, Shibuya said.
Others caution against predicting the contagion pattern seen in Hokkaido could
be repeated elsewhere in the country.
Social activity rebounded there faster than in other parts of the country, and
that in turn led to an "earlier third wave" that coincided with the start of
winter, Takanori Teshima, a professor at the medical school at Hokkaido
University.
"The kinetics of pandemic differ between Hokkaido and Honshu," he said.
(Reporting by Rocky Swift and Linda Sieg; Editing by Miyoung Kim & Simon
Cameron-Moore)
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