The owner of a small restaurant on the island of Okinawa told a few friends he had the coronaviruses. Police went to his home and found him dead in his bed after he didn't answer his phone for three days.
He was one of hundreds of people who have died because of the policy of having some COVID-19 patients "recuperate" at home.
In Japan, people with the virus have been denied hospital care because of the country's affordable and accessible health care system.
The sister and daughter of a man who died at home of COVID-19 have started an online support group for grieving relatives.
The government of Japan has drawn up a road map to improve its response to the swine flu. The plan adopted Nov. 12 aims to have more beds for patients by the end of the month.
More than 231,000 coronavirus patients needed hospitalization in late August, according to government data. Many had to recuperate at home.
The Prime Minister promised to have health care workers visit COVID-19 patients at home.
The country with the largest number of beds per capita is a factor in the changes. The resignation of Yoshihide Suga was due to widespread discontent with the government's response to the swine flu.
In a conformist society like Japan, speaking up takes courage and class action lawsuits are rare. Kaori Takada, Takeuchi's sister, and others in her group believe that their loved ones were denied the medical care they deserved.
She said she had to raise her voice.
She is not sure what to do. Thousands are following the group's account and others have come forward with similar painful stories.
Takada, who lives in Osaka and runs a small nursery in her home, was Takeuchi's only remaining relative. He did not tell her that he was alone at home when they spoke on the phone before he was diagnosed. He didn't want word to get out because of the widespread fear in Japan.
Takada said that he was a gentle man.
She said in a telephone interview that they are trying to heal, sharing how people have been treated so cruelly, and perhaps helping each other take that first step forward.
The local public health bureaus in Japan were unable to find hospitals that would admit COVID-19 patients. In some cases, ambulances were moved from hospital to hospital.
The calls to set up big field hospitals went unheeded.
Hospitals in New York were quickly converted to accommodate more patients. A Navy medical ship was turned into a makeshift hospital. There were more than 1,600 new hospitalizations a day during the peak of the outbreak.
In August of this year, when infections in Japan surged with the spread of the delta variant, Japan's hospital systems were quickly declared "stretched thin" even though it has had far fewer COVID-19 cases than the U.S., Europe and some other Asian and South American countries More than 134,000 people were sick with the virus at home in early September.
In a population of 126 million, 18,000 Japanese have died of COVID-19-related deaths. The National Police Agency tracks deaths, but no one knows how many people have died at home since March 2020.
The head of the Japan Community Health Care Organization, or JCHO, has urged the government to set up emergency field hospitals in order to avoid deaths from the coronaviruses.
Japan's health care system is dominated by small, private hospitals and clinics, and few inpatient facilities are equipped to handle infectious diseases. Many beds are occupied by people with mental illnesses, and there are few doctors, intensive care specialists and nurses.
In some places, local authorities arranged for such hospitals to accept patients who were no longer infectious after they were treated at larger hospitals. The beds available for critical care were outnumbered by caseloads.
The JCHO has 57 hospitals in Japan. All are subsidized by taxpayers. The Health Ministry said it would give up to $100,000 per bed for COVID-19 patients.
JCHO said in October that it had prepared
JCHO didn't comment on the call for more beds.
A critical care physician at Nagoya University believes hospital care needs to be restructured to focus on seriously ill patients in designated facilities, instead of spreading them across small hospitals that each have a handful of ICU beds.
He said that resources were mishandled, including the hospitalizations of people who didn't need it. He said that public health bureaus are not suited to begatekeepers of COVID-19 care.
Even if Japan manages to ride out the current outbreak, it will be unprepared for the next one because of the deep problems in the decades-old system.
No other nation turned away patients like this. The idea of doctors not seeing patients should not be raised. If you are a doctor, you have to take care of the sick.
Japan has not done anything. He said there had been no leadership.
The time to act is now, before another wave of coronaviruses hits, said Dr. Kenji Shibuya, research director at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research.
Even though they knew it was coming, they didn't act. He said that it was about lack of commitment, lack of will, and lack of passion.
In August, Yuko Nishizato, co- founder of Takada's group, pleaded with hospitals to admit her father. He died after testing positive for COVID-19 without ever getting treatment.
He called the public health center multiple times before he died. It's hard to know that all he got was recordings.
I wanted him to see his children. Nishizato said he wanted him to see a more grown up him. I don't understand why so many people have suffered the same way.
The person said, "
Follow AP's coverage of the coronaviruses.
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There is a person named Yuri Kageyama on the social networking site, Twitter.
