Travelers at Shinjuku Station on January 5th. Japan is due to declare an emergency on Thursday in Tokyo and three neighboring areas.
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Restrictions set to be imposed under Japan’s state of emergency can last for months, with government advisers and critics of its strategy calling for broader measures than current proposals.
Japan is due to declare an emergency as early as Thursday in Tokyo and three neighboring areas, with relatively narrow restrictions focused on reducing infections in bars and restaurants. But, as in the spring, the statement could drag on if those measures don’t change people’s behavior, experts say.
Suspending the state of emergency in less than a month would be “almost impossible,” Shigeru Omi, head of the expert panel advising the government, said on Tuesday. “It will take a little longer – March or April, I’m not sure.”
Cases across the country reached 5,000 for the first time on Wednesday, with Tokyo among a series of regions that saw record increases in one day. The continued increase will present new challenges to the effectiveness of the expected 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 combat 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 loss.
Read More: What will Tokyo’s second state of emergency mean?
Despite saying that it was not necessary to repeat the spring emergency, Omi called for measures that would increase the effectiveness of restaurant restrictions, including encouraging remote work. Suga has sometimes dismissed the panel’s recommendations, especially in relation to a travel subsidy program that has continued to function even with the current wave.
Although the restrictions are expected to last a month, the government plans to define in advance the specific conditions for raising the emergency, with areas needing to return to “Stage 3” in a layered system that measures criteria such as number of infections and hospital conditions, Nikkei reported.
Omi’s pleas were echoed by Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases at Kyoto University who was instrumental in defining the “Three Cs” strategy to avoid the places where infections were most likely to spread.
“At the very least, it will take about two months” to get things under control, he told the public broadcaster NHK. Nishiura published a model predicting that limiting steps to bars and restaurants would not reduce the transmission number sufficiently and would instead keep the boxes 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 specialist who has before coming into conflict with lawmakers, they also said that broader measures were needed.
“The layers of infection have already spread too far and intervention in restaurants is not an effective policy,” he I wrote on twitter. “The worst thing to do would be to go into a diluted state of emergency.”
Iwata made headlines in February for suggesting that Tokyo could become a “second Wuhan” and called for a total block to control the virus in the spring, a step that turned out to be unnecessary.
Highest number of cases
Although the government is eager to avoid these broader measures, in doing so it runs the same risk that European countries encountered when trying to impose a “lockdown lite ”in the fall. Japan is entering its current state of emergency, with infections in Tokyo averaging nearly 1,000 in the past seven days, although cases per capita are still less than a tenth of those seen in the UK, which has also returned to its more rigid blockade.
Japan received praise for its fight against the virus, counting on public cooperation, as its constitution makes European-style forced blockades impossible. Although critics at the time said the measures were too light, the country ended up leaving the state of emergency in just six weeks and avoided a second during a summer peak.
Many factors this time are different. Japan left the first emergency as soon as the summer was starting. But January and February are the coldest months of the year in the Tokyo region, making ventilation more difficult and providing a more favorable environment for the disease – something other nations like South Korea have also had to contend with.
The country can also fight for public cooperation in the same way it did in the spring. Employees have feared that public concern about the virus was waning, while many bars and restaurants were already pushed to the limit last year, it may be reluctant to cooperate with closing requests.
(Updates with official Tokyo virus cases in the third paragraph)