Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 5, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 5, 2022 - Jan 30, 2023
Date Accepted: Jan 18, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 18, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Ethical challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic: a Japanese perspective
ABSTRACT
This article focuses on how Japan experienced the Covid-19 pandemic. It delineates the various challenges the country faced and the measures the national government enacted to stop the spread of the infection. The article begins with the author’s personal experience of Covid-19. The second section explains how the Japanese government lacked the legal sanctions to enforce a state of emergency. The third section deals with the current pandemic response as characterised by the increased use of digital technologies to control the spread of the virus. I argue that the lack of effective governance hampered Japan’s timely use of digital technologies. The fourth section will touch on the issues created by the rapid spread of the infection and an increase in the hospitalisation rate, focusing on ICU triage and the ethical debates that ensued in Japan. The fifth section discusses the pandemic from the perspective of disaster preparedness and management, exploring the ways the pandemic responses share ethical challenges with other disasters, such as earthquakes and typhoons.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.