Japan Logs Record Cases of Hospital Transport Difficulty

Tokyo, Feb. 1 (Jiji Press)--The number of cases in which ambulance crews struggled to find hospitals that would accept emergency patients in Japan totaled 5,303 in the week through Sunday, hitting a record high for the third straight week, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said Tuesday. The weekly figure grew by 353 from the preceding week. Of the total, patients suspected to be infected with the novel coronavirus made up the largest group, at 1,833, up 417. The surge in such patients apparently reflects the spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant. The agency defines transport difficulty cases as those in which ambulance crews contacted medical institutions at least four times and took 30 minutes or more from their arrival at the locations of emergency patients before starting to transport them. The survey covered 52 fire departments in major cities across Japan. END