Japan ’s health officials have singled out Tokyo’s nightlife districts as a growing source of coronavirus infections, with patrons of bars, restaurants and other establishments possibly passing the illness on to their families and colleagues.
Kazuhiro Tateda, president of the Japan Association of Infectious Diseases and a member of the committee set up by the government to combat the spread of the virus, said infections were “spreading seriously in nightlife districts such as Shinjuku, Ginza and Roppongi”.
He made a link between this development and reports of more infections among people in their 30s and 40s. Nearly 600 of the more than 2,000 cases in Japan are in Tokyo, which has a population of 14 million. Government figures showed that 40 per cent of the 416 people who tested positive in the capital in recent days were aged between their late teens and 40s.
“This is related to nightlife,” said Tateda. “This is a very busy district of nightclubs where people are close together and that is popular with middle-aged men.”
Kenichi Yoshizumi, the mayor of Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward that houses the Kabuki-cho red light district, said medical facilities there were on the verge of being “overwhelmed”, and echoed earlier calls by Tokyo’s Governor Yuriko Koike for people to stay away from nightlife outlets.
The Japanese government has so far resisted imposing tougher measures to make people stay at home and for businesses to suspend operations, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying doing so would restrict people’s rights.
On Thursday, Abe maintained that infections had not spread “rapidly and widely” though he warned that the country was “barely holding the line”.
“But if we lower our guard now even a little, infections can accelerate suddenly at any moment. We continue to be on the brink,” Abe said.
“It’s critically important to prevent a sharp rise in cases in the Tokyo metropolitan area with a large population, which is at the centre of economic activity,” he added.
Analysts have calculated that a shutdown of the Tokyo metropolitan district for one month would result in a 5 per cent slump in GDP, at a cost of about US$244.7 billion. The government is compiling what it says will be its “boldest-ever” stimulus package , including cash handouts to households and subsidies to small companies.
Tateda said the government’s advisory panel concurred there was no need to declare a state of emergency right now, despite growing calls on social media for the authorities to take more decisive action, similar to the lockdowns and sweeping restrictions imposed elsewhere. Hong Kong has closed karaoke bars and Singapore has ordered entertainment venues to suspend operations , while telling employers to implement work from home arrangements as far as possible.
Tateda said Japan’s strategy was to attempt to keep infections at the present relatively low levels to build up natural resistance in a large percentage of the population. The strategy of herd immunity has been tried elsewhere, notably the UK, but was quickly abandoned when it became clear that the disease had already spread exponentially and was killing more people than anticipated.
“So far, we feel that we are keeping the situation relatively stable,” said Tateda. “It’s not perfect, of course, but compared to other countries, the number of deaths is very low. So we feel that so far, so good.”
Japan has carried out 34,508 tests in a nation of 126.8 million people, or 274 tests per million people. Late last month, Singapore had a testing rate of 6,800 tests per million people compared with around 6,500 in South Korea, and 1,000 in Taiwan.
Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido who specialises in infection control for nurses, said a state of emergency should have been declared already. But she conceded that Japan did not have laws that permitted the government to impose a lockdown.
Tsukamoto said based on reports she was receiving from hospitals, Japan’s health care facilities would struggle to cope with a sharp increase in cases unless more drastic measures were taken to limit the spread of the virus.
“I’ve been talking to people working in hospitals and the situation sounds serious,” Tsukamoto said. “I have heard that one major hospital in Tokyo has had to shut down its emergency department and transfer more than 100 patients to another hospital because there are fears the virus was spreading.
“Staff have become infected and it will spread rapidly in an environment like that,” she said. “The medical system is going to be under a lot of strain.”
Additional reporting by Reuters and Kyodo
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP) , the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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