Travelers 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 that will be imposed under Japan’s state of emergency could last for months, with government advisers and critics of its strategy calling for broader measures than current proposals.
Japan will declare an emergency as early as Thursday in Tokyo and three surrounding areas, with relatively tight restrictions focused on reducing infections in bars and restaurants. But as in the spring, the statement can be dragged on if these moves fail to change people’s behavior, experts say.
Raising the state of emergency in less than a month would be “almost impossible,” Shigeru Omi, the head of the group of experts advising the government, he said Tuesday. “He’ll need a little more: March or April, I’m not sure.”
On Wednesday, national cases exceeded 5,000 for the first time, with Tokyo among a large number of regions that recorded one-day revenue increases. The continuous increase will pose additional challenges for the effectiveness of the expected measures.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has it called for a more focused state of emergency than the one that devastated the economy last spring. It seeks to address the spread of coronavirus infections in restaurants that have been the main source of the current increase, while limiting the scope of restrictions to reduce economic damage.
Read more: What would the second state of emergency in Tokyo mean?
Despite saying that a new spring emergency operation was not necessary, Omi called for measures to increase the effectiveness of restaurant restrictions, including the promotion of teleworking. At times, Suga has given a short influence to the group’s recommendations, especially with regard to a travel subsidy program that continued to operate even as the current wave grew.
Although the restrictions are expected to last a month, the government plans to establish specific conditions in advance to lift the emergency, with areas needing to return to “phase 3” in a tiered system that measures criteria such as the number of infections and hospital conditions, the Nikkei reported.
Omi’s calls were echoed by Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases at Kyoto University, who helped define the “Three C’s” strategy to avoid sites most likely to spread. of infections.
“It will take at least about two months” to get things under control, he said he told public broadcaster NHK. Nishiura published a model that predicted that limiting passes to bars and restaurants would not sufficiently reduce the number of broadcasts and 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 it he clashed with policymakers earlier, he also said wider steps were needed.
“The layers of infections have already spread too far, and intervening in restaurants is not an effective policy,” he said he wrote on Twitter. “The worst thing that should be done would be to have a state of emergency watered down.”
Iwata published headlines in February to suggest that Tokyo could become a “second Wuhan” and called for a complete blockade to control the virus in the spring, a step that ultimately proved unnecessary.
Higher case load
While the government is keen to avoid these broader steps, in doing so it runs the same risk that European countries found in trying to impose a “lockdown lite ”in the fall. Japan enters 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 observed in the UK, which has also back to its strictest closure.
Japan won praise for its first fight against the virus, based on public cooperation, as its constitution makes European-style forced closures impossible. Although critics at the time claimed the steps were too light, the country finally came out of the state of emergency in just six weeks and avoided a second during a summer wave.
Many factors this time are different. Japan left the first emergency just as summer began. But January and February are the coldest months of the year in the Tokyo region, making it difficult to ventilate and providing a more preferable environment for the disease, which they have also had to struggle with other nations like South Korea.
The country can also fight for public cooperation in the same way it did in the spring. Officials do he worried that public concern about the virus was waning, while many bars and restaurants, already pushed to the brink over the past year, may be reluctant to cooperate with closure requests.
(Updates with official cases of Tokyo virus in the third paragraph)