Tokyo is on its highest COVID-19 alert level after a spike in new cases, the city’s governor said yesterday, as experts said the rising number of infections were a clear “red flag.”
However, the move to “red” alert does not mean the city would ask businesses to close or events to be postponed. Even during a national state of emergency in April, there was no “lockdown” in Japan as seen in many other nations.
“The experts just told us that the situation of infections is at the fourth level of the four-level system, which means ‘the infections seem to be spreading,’” Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said at a meeting on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her comments came after a panel of experts said that the city was seeing a spike in younger people infected with the virus, with cases in nightlife areas, but also workplaces and in families.
“Our assessment is that we cannot but say this is the red flag, the highest level, if we simply look at numbers,” said Norio Ohmagari, an expert on the panel.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted a nationwide state of emergency in late May and appears to have little appetite to reintroduce it, with the economy suffering its first recession since 2015, but new daily cases have climbed after the state of emergency was removed, reaching a fresh record last week of 243 in Tokyo, the epicenter of the fresh outbreak.
Authorities say many of the new cases come from nightlife entertainment districts in the capital, and those infected appear to be mostly people in their 20s and 30s, who are less likely to become seriously ill.
As of yesterday, there were only seven people requiring intensive care for COVID-19 and authorities said that the medical system is in better shape than at the height of the previous wave in April.
Japan has had 22,849 COVID-19 cases and 984 deaths since the disease was first detected in the nation. No one has died of COVID-19 in Tokyo for three weeks.
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