It's been more than a year since COVID-19 came into Japan. Currently, Japan is in the fourth wave of COVID-19 and many infected people and patients are in major cities. While the roll-out of vaccination is delayed, people are less prophylactic than they used to be, except for wearing masks. Although Japan is behind Taiwan and South Korea, it has succeeded in taking measures against COVID-19 in terms of the number of patients per capita and the number of deaths compared to other industrialized nations. “Soft lockdown”, contact tracing and anti-cluster measures, the government message including avoiding Three Cs, and so on have worked. But success often becomes a cause of failure. The talk will describe some of those measures implemented in Japan so far and discuss their possible fragility.

Dr. Yasuki Kobayashi has rigorously worked in areas of health policy and public health in Japan for more than thirty years. His research activities focus on the topics related to health care systems in general through developing empirical studies. He has carried on those studies as related to both the supply and demand sides of health services, including the supply and distribution of physicians, access to health care, cost studies on hospital care versus home care, establishing claim databases, and quality of care. He graduated from Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo. He worked at the University of the Ryukyus Hospital, Teikyo University, and University of Tsukuba, and since 1998, has been a professor at the University of Tokyo. He was a Takemi Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health and is the founding dean of the University of Tokyo School of Public Health, which was established in 2007.