Japan must significantly ramp up the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations or face the prospect of up to four more states of emergency by the end of next March, according to projections by two researchers.
The authors of the study, Dr. Yasuharu Tokuda, director at Muribushi Okinawa Center for Teaching Hospitals, and Toshikazu Kuniya, associate professor of system informatics at Kobe University, made the projection based on a scenario under which an average of 220,000 jabs are given daily — roughly the pace when they were working on the study last month.
At that pace, it would take 1,000 days to inoculate the country's 110 million residents age 16 and over with two doses each. As of May 13, 5,593,436 shots had been given for an average of about 65,000 jabs per day since the start of the rollout on Feb. 17. Around 286,000 jabs were given on Thursday, bringing the average for the preceding week to about 193,000, as the country begins to ramp up the pace of its inoculations to older people.