Dialoguepk

29 July 2020 Author: Keiichiro Kobayashi, Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research As COVID-19 cases began to mount in Japan in February, it became clear that the government needed to respond with strong policy measures. It was crucial to increase testing capacity and adopt isolation measures to contain the virus and allow economic activity to resume quickly. The Japanese government needed to set and clearly announce a timeline and numerical targets for testing capacity and medical care provision.  Some of these ideas have been incorporated in the government’s  Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform 2020 , published on 17 July 2020. The major challenge Japan currently faces is its extremely limited testing capacity compared with other advanced countries. Japan’s polymerase chain reaction testing capacity is only 32,000 tests per day (as of 12 July), compared to 400,000 in the United States and 160,000 in Germany. Japan needs to systematically increase its cap