Commuters at Shinjuku Station on January 5th. Japan is already proposing an emergency in Tokyo and three surrounding areas on Thursday.
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Restrictions that will be imposed under Japan’s state of emergency could take months, with both government advisers and critics of its strategy calling for broader steps than current proposals.
Japan plans to declare an emergency in Tokyo and three surrounding areas as early as Thursday, with relatively limited restrictions aimed at reducing infections at pubs and restaurants. But as in the spring, the statement could continue if people could not change the behavior, experts say.
Shigeru Omi, the head of the panel of experts advising the government, would take up a state of emergency in less than a month. Said Tuesday. “It will take a little longer – March or April, I do not know.”
Cases nationwide rose 5,000 for the first time on Wednesday, with Tokyo among a number of regions recording an increase in one day. The ongoing upswing will pose further challenges to the effectiveness of the expected measures.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has asked for a more focused state of emergency than the economy devastated last spring. He wants to tackle the spread of coronavirus infections in restaurants that have been the main source of the current boom, while limiting the scope of the restrictions to reduce the economic damage.
Read more: What will Tokyo’s second state of emergency mean?
Despite the fact that Omi said that the re-emergency of the spring was not necessary asked for moves that would increase the effectiveness of restrictions on eating places, including encouraging remote work. Suga sometimes kept a close eye on the panel’s recommendations, especially about a travel subsidy program that continues, even as the current wave has risen.
Although restrictions last for a month, the government plans to propose in advance the specific conditions for the removal of the emergency, with areas having to return to “Phase 3” on a low system that measures criteria such as infection rates and hospital conditions. reported the Nikkei.
Omi’s calls were reflected by Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases at the University of Kyoto, who played an important role in defining the ‘Three C’s strategy to prevent the infections from likely spreading. .
“It will take at least two months to get things under control,” he said. said the public broadcaster NHK. Nishiura has published a model that predicts that restricting steps to pubs and restaurants would not sufficiently reduce the shipment number and that business would rather remain at their current level. Steps similar to the first state of emergency would reduce the consequences in Tokyo to less than 100 by the end of February, according to the model.
Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese expert on infectious diseases who has previously clashed with policymakers, also says broader steps are needed.
“The low infections have already spread too much, and intervening in restaurants is not an effective policy,” he said. wrote on Twitter. “The worst thing to do is to have a dehydrated state of emergency.”
Iwata made headlines in February over the proposal that Tokyo could become a ‘second Wuhan’ and asked for a complete exclusion to control the virus in the spring, a step that was ultimately unnecessary.
Higher case load
Although the government would like to avoid these broader steps, it runs the same risk as countries in Europe found when they tried to “lockdown lite ”in the fall. In the last seven days, Japan has entered the current state of emergency with infections in Tokyo, which averaged almost 1000, although the per capita cases are still less than a tenth of those seen in the UK, which has also returned to the strictest exclusion .
Japan has been praised for its early approach to the virus, and relies on public cooperation as its constitution is applied in European style. While critics at the time claimed the steps were too light, the country eventually left the state of emergency within just six weeks and avoided a second during a summer boom.
Many factors differ this time. Japan left the first emergency just as summer began. But January and February are the coldest months of the year in the Tokyo region, which complicates ventilation and provides a better environment for the disease – something that other countries such as South Korea have also faced.
The country may also struggle to gain public co-operation in the same way as in the spring. Officials became concerned that the concern about the virus was diminishing, while many pubs and restaurants did pushed over the past year may be reluctant to cooperate on requests to close.
(Updates with official Tokyo virus cases in third paragraph)