Reconstruction in the wake of torrential rain in Kyushu has been hampered by a manpower shortage amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, with the region marking on Tuesday one month since the disaster that killed 76 people and left three others missing.
The hardest-hit prefecture of Kumamoto, where 65 people died and 1,408 were living in evacuation shelters as of Monday, has struggled to secure sufficient workers for recovery efforts, such as removal of debris, because it is only soliciting volunteers locally for fear of introducing the virus.
Both a public health nurse in his 30s, sent to Kumamoto from Takamatsu in Kagawa Prefecture to help check the health of residents at evacuation centers, and a Jiji Press photographer in his 30s who covered the natural disaster, tested positive for the virus in July.