Commuters to Shinjuku Station on January 5th. Japan will declare an emergency on Thursday in Tokyo and three surrounding areas.
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
The restrictions to be imposed in the wake of Japan’s state of emergency could take several months, and both government advisers and critics of its strategy are calling for wider steps than current proposals.
Japan is due to declare an emergency on Thursday in Tokyo and three surrounding areas, with relatively narrow restrictions focused on reducing infections in bars and restaurants. But, as in the spring, the statement can continue if those movements fail to change people’s behavior, experts say.
It would be “almost impossible” to lift the state of emergency in less than a month, said Shigeru Omi, head of the group of experts advising the government. he said Tuesday. “He’ll need something more – March or April, I’m not sure.”
Nationwide cases exceeded 5,000 for the first time on Wednesday, with Tokyo in a number of regions recording record one-day increases. The ongoing growth will pose additional challenges to the effectiveness of the planned measures.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has called for a more focused state of emergency than the one that devastated the economy last spring. He is trying to address the spread of coronavirus infections in restaurants that have been a primary source of current growth, while limiting the scope of restrictions to reduce economic damage.
Read more: What will the second state of emergency in Tokyo mean?
Despite the fact that it was not necessary to resume the spring emergency, Omi called for measures that would increase the effectiveness of restaurant restrictions, including encouraging remote work. At times, Suga gave little influence to the group’s recommendations, especially in connection with a travel subsidy program that continued to run even as the current wave grew.
While the restrictions are expected to last a month, the government intends to establish in advance the specific conditions for lifting the emergency, the areas to return to “stage 3” on a multilevel system that measures criteria such as the number of infections and hospital conditions, Nikkei reported.
Omi’s calls were repeated by Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert in the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases at Kyoto University, who helped define the “Three C’s” strategy to avoid the places where infections were most likely to spread. .
“It will take at least two months to get things under control,” he said told public broadcaster NHK. Nishiura published a model that stated that limiting steps to bars and restaurants would not sufficiently reduce the number of transmissions and would instead keep cases at their current level. Steps similar to the first state of emergency would reduce cases in Tokyo to less than 100 by the end of February, according to the model.
Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese infectious disease expert who has he clashed with political decision-makers, saying more steps were needed.
“The layers of infection have already spread too much, and intervention in restaurants is not an effective policy,” he said. wrote on Twitter. “The worst thing to do would be to have a low state of emergency.”
Iwata drew headlines in February for suggesting that Tokyo could become a “second Wuhan” and called for a complete blockade for virus control in the spring, a step that eventually proved useless.
Larger caseload
While the government wants to avoid these broader steps, it risks the same risk that European countries have faced when trying to impose a “lockdown lite ”fall. Japan is in the current state of emergency with infections in Tokyo averaging nearly 1,000 in the last seven days, although per capita cases are still less than a tenth of those seen in the UK, which has returned to the strictest blockade. .
Japan has won praise for its early approach to the virus, relying on public cooperation, as its constitution makes forced European-style blockades impossible. While critics at the time argued that the steps were too easy, the country finally came out of the state of emergency in just six weeks and avoided a second one during a summer wave.
Many factors this time are different. Japan left the first emergency just as summer was beginning. But January and February are the coldest months of the year in the Tokyo region, which makes ventilation more difficult and provides a more preferable environment for the disease – something other nations, such as South Korea, have had to deal with.
The country could also fight for public cooperation just like in the spring. Officials have he worried that public concern about the virus was waning, while many bars and restaurants already pushed to the edge in the last year, may be reluctant to cooperate with closure requests.
(Updates with official Tokyo virus cases in the third paragraph)