Naoko Muto feels it is just a matter of luck that the day care center she runs hasn’t had any COVID-19 cases despite the rapid spread of the omicron variant.

With heaters on full blast, the Takakura day care center in Nagoya keeps its windows slightly open all day to improve ventilation, while everything from nursing rooms to staff break rooms are disinfected daily. Basically, Muto says, her team is doing everything it can to prevent one of its employees or children from getting infected, which would force the facility to close down.

“Day cares have a societal role that allows working parents to go to work,” said Muto, whose facility has 121 pre-schoolers up to the age of 6 under its care. “But even if we do everything possible, we may not be able to prevent one of us from being infected.”

Muto is one of the scores of day care operators nationwide fearful of having to close down if a child or staffer gets infected with the coronavirus.

On Monday, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry announced that a record 327 licensed day care facilities nationwide were closed as of Jan. 20 due to the virus. The figure exceeded the 185 facilities forced to shut down in early September during the fifth wave.

Day care closures are much more than an inconvenience for parents and can affect all sectors of society by forcing essential workers, among others, to take time off and care for their children.

In Japan, licensed day care centers are for households where both parents work or cannot take care of their child during the day for various reasons. Parents are screened by municipalities in order to be eligible to enroll their children.

When a day care shuts down, parents are typically forced to take time off work or work remotely from home if they can’t get help from family or friends.

A 38-year-old mother of two who lives in Kawasaki had to scramble to adjust her work plans last week when her 4-year-old son’s day care closed for four days after a COVID-19 case was detected in the facility.

“I had to go to the office on the Wednesday and my husband can’t work from home so he took the day off to take care of our son,” said Nori Kawashima, who works in Yokohama as an administrative staff member.

Kawashima worked from home for the remaining days while her son binge-watched Disney movies.

“He was laying around on the floor all day and only got up to go to the bathroom,” she said. “He didn’t eat much for lunch because he wasn’t hungry.”

One of Kawashima’s friends was off on Friday, so her son was able to go out and play at a nearby park in the afternoon with her friend and her child.

The health ministry is asking day care facility operators to stay open as much as possible, but it is up to municipalities to decide whether or not to close down if a teacher or child is infected.

In Nagoya, day care centers will close if a staffer or child is a close contact of a COVID-19 patient. If one of them gets infected, facilities will close for 10 days, retroactive to the day after the infected individual was last at the center.

“At day care centers, children of all ages spend time together in the same room in the mornings or in the evenings, so we can’t just shut down one classroom like elementary schools,” said Yasunori Nagata, an official in charge of day cares at the Nagoya Municipal Government.

Still, the city allows day cares to reopen some classrooms after several days, provided they have enough teachers who are not close contacts to take care of children. As of Tuesday, 150 day cares in Nagoya were closed, but 28 of those facilities had partially reopened.

Many other municipalities under quasi-emergency measures are now asking parents to keep their children home in order to decrease the number of children at local day care centers, and, in turn, lower the infection risk.

In the latest wave, younger people are getting infected more often compared to other age groups, with those under the age of 19 accounting for 26.1% of the cases based on data from Jan. 1 to Jan. 24, according to the health ministry. The figure was higher than the 20.7% rate for December.

Takaji Wakita, head of the ministry’s COVID-19 expert panel, said Wednesday that infections are spreading, especially among children age 9 and younger, in elementary schools, kindergartens and day care centers.

Classes at elementary, junior high and high schools are shutting down as well due to students and teachers testing positive for COVID-19. The education ministry is currently compiling data on the number of schools that have shut down nationwide.

Still, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Tuesday the government has no plans to close schools nationwide, unlike in the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

Vaccines have only been administered to people age 12 and older. The health ministry has approved Pfizer’s jab for children between the ages of 5 to 11, but the rollout won’t start until around March at the earliest. As of Monday, 74.48% of people age 12 to 19 have been vaccinated with two shots, slightly lower than the 78.7% rate for the population as a whole.

Mask-wearing is mandatory at schools, but the health ministry is advising against them for those younger than 2 at day cares, since they would likely struggle to take them off on their own or tell their teachers when they are not feeling well.

In the end, there may not be much more day care operators can do to keep their doors open given the size of the current COVID-19 wave, which has highlighted the vital role such facilities play in keeping the country running.

“About 20% to 30% of the parents at our day care are essential workers, working as medical and health care providers,” noted Muto, the head of Takakura day care. “But all of the parents, in one way or another, work to keep society functioning.”