The Covid-19 pandemic (Coronavirus disease 2019) continues to expose countless unanticipated problems at all levels of the world’s complex, interconnected society — global domino effects involving public health and safety, accessible health care, food security, stability of economies and financial institutions, and even the viability of democracies.

These problems posed immense challenges that can voraciously consume human and capital resources. Tracking the initiation, spread, and changing trends of Covid-19 at population-wide scales is one of the most daunting challenges, especially the urgent need to map the distribution and magnitude of Covid-19 in near real-time.

As our institute, “Pax Japonica” is an inevitable process including the following four elements;
1. Prioritizing anticipatory governance
2. Providing risk-free environment to all the stakeholders
3. Enhanced application of advanced technologies to social realities with public engagement
4. Transfering the solutions of “Grand Challenges” to the entire global community

As our vision “Pax Japonica” signifies, we pose anticipatory governance and endeavour to support the fulfill the gap between future sinario and ideal future. To realize “Pax Japonica”, we would like to focus on waste water to deal with the coming pandemic.

In these days, Japan enacted bill to establish Japanese CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in 2023 in order to prepare the next pandemic(Nikkei). Meanwhile, there are some critiques have been made to Japanese CDC, such as monitoring system.

For example, Japan has been struggle to employ other ways to detect the cases except PCR test. To overcome the negative aspect, we would like to track and report our activities related with Waste Water Surveillance in Japan as a remedy for critiques.

At a moment, Waste Water Surveillance has been conducted in Hokkaido and Kanagawa in Japan.

＜Result of Waste Water Surveillance in Sagami river in Kanagawa＞

（Source：Kanagawa Prefectual Government HP）

Compared with PCR test, waste water surveillance is cheaper to be conducted and easy to detect the movement of Virus in a certain area. As pandemic during 2021 showed, PCR test is difficult to monitor the movement of Virus. At a moment, waste water surveillance is difficult to proceed social implication in a sense that PCR test has already been established in Japan.

Our institute will report the process of social implication for waste water surveillance with fieldworks.

Corporate Planning Group
Shugo IWASAKI