Commuters at Shinjuku Station on Jan.5. Japan will declare an emergency situation in Tokyo and three surrounding areas on Thursday.
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Photographer: Yuichi Yamazaki / Getty Images
Restrictions that will be imposed under the Japanese state of emergency can take months, with both government advisers and critics of the strategy calling for broader steps than the current proposals.
Japan will already declare an emergency in Tokyo and three surrounding areas on Thursday, with relatively narrow restrictions aimed at reducing infections in bars and restaurants. But just like in the spring, the explanation could drag on if those moves don’t change people’s behavior, experts claim.
Lifting the state of emergency in less than a month would be “ near impossible, ” said Shigeru Omi, the head of the government’s panel of experts, said on Tuesday. “It takes a little longer – March or April, I’m not sure.”
Across the country, it hit 5,000 cases for the first time on Wednesday, with Tokyo being one of many regions to see record one-day growth. The continued increase will further test the effectiveness of the expected measures.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has called for a more targeted state of emergency than the one that devastated the economy last spring. He is trying to stem the spread of coronavirus infections in restaurants that have been a primary source of the current wave, while limiting the scope of the restrictions to lessen the economic damage.
Read more: What does Tokyo’s second state of emergency mean?
Despite saying there was no need for a rerun of the spring emergency, Omi called for measures that would increase the effectiveness of restrictions on dining options, including encouraging remote working. Suga has occasionally made short work of the panel’s recommendations, particularly on a travel grant program that kept going even as the current wave soared.
While restrictions are foreseen for a month, the government plans to establish in advance the specific conditions for emergency lifting, with areas returning to “Phase 3” on a tiered system that measures criteria such as infection rates and hospital conditions, reported the Nikkei.
Omi’s calls 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 are most likely to spread .
“It takes at least almost two months” to get things under control, he told public broadcaster NHK. Nishiura published a model that predicted that restricting steps to bars and restaurants would not reduce the transmission rate enough and instead keep cases at current levels. Steps similar to the first state of emergency would reduce the number of cases in Tokyo to less than 100 by the end of February, according to the model.
Kentaro Iwata, a Japanese infectious disease expert previously clashed with policymakers, also said broader steps were needed.
“The layers of infection have already spread too much and intervention in restaurants is not an effective policy,” he says wrote on Twitter. “The worst thing you can do is get into a watered-down emergency.”
Iwata made headlines in February for suggesting Tokyo could become a “second Wuhan” and called for a full lockdown to fight the virus in the spring, a step that ultimately proved unnecessary.
Higher caseload
While the government is keen to avoid those broader steps, it runs the same risk that countries in Europe found when they attempted 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 the number of cases per capita is still less than a tenth of that in the UK, which has also reverted to the most severe blocking.
Japan has been praised for its early approach to the virus, relying on public cooperation, as the constitution makes forced European-style lockdowns impossible. While critics at the time claimed the steps were too light, the country eventually exited a state of emergency in just six weeks and avoided a second one during a summer wave.
Many factors are different this time. Japan exited its first emergency just as summer started. But January and February are the coldest months of the year in the Tokyo region, making ventilation more difficult and a better environment for the disease – something other countries, such as South Korea, have also faced.
The country may also struggle to achieve public cooperation in the same way as it did in the spring. Officials have feared that public concern about the virus was on the wane, while many bars and restaurants already pushed to the limit in the past year may be reluctant to cooperate with requests to close.
(Updates with official Tokyo virus cases in third paragraph)