As Japan emerges from a state of emergency, the Yokohama City Seibu Hospital, once the site of one of the worst hit hospitals of the coronavirus outbreaks, is grappling to operate alongside a virus with no treatment or cure.

For most of May, the 500-bed hospital had sat empty. After the outbreak, it halted nearly all outpatient services. Doctors and nurses were required to spend two weeks at home, monitoring for symptoms before they could return to work.

Now, as the country emerges from a state of emergency, hospitals like Seibu face the prospect of operating in the shadow of a virus with no treatment or cure.

"We can never have an outbreak again like the one we experienced," said Masui, an emergency doctor who has been charged with the hospital's coronavirus response. "What we learned is that this can truly happen anywhere.

Doctors and nurses at Seibu were among the first to mobilize for the pandemic in Japan, accepting sick passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February.

After treating dozens of coronavirus patients, a man with no fever and no other obvious symptoms was carried into the emergency room in early April. The man was kept in a room with another patient before he was discharged to another facility. By the time the staff learned in late April the man had the virus, it had already spread to other wings of the hospital.