Economic Revitalization Minister Nishimura Yasutoshi said on Friday that the government will maintain the state of emergency for the time being.
Nishimura was speaking at a meeting of a panel of experts to advise the government on coronavirus policy. The meeting’s members agreed to update their basic anti-coronavirus guidelines to reflect recent legal revisions that allow tougher enforcement of anti-infection rules. The revised legislation was approved in the Diet earlier this month and will take effect on Saturday. It will allow officials to fine people and businesses that break anti-virus rules.
Tokyo reported 434 new cases on Thursday, the fifth day in a row that the number is below 500. But the number of deaths is not following the same trend. More than 120 people have died from COVID-19 in the week through Thursday, almost the same number. number like last week.
The head of the specialist group, Omi Shigeru, said Friday’s discussions focused primarily on mutated strains of the virus first known in the UK and South Africa. These variants are thought to be more transmissible than the original virus. Omi called for immediate and thorough testing, adding asymptomatic people, in high-risk areas.
According to the health ministry, 108 cases had been found in Japan by February 10. Of those, 65 were confirmed outside airport quarantine rooms. All but four were the variant first reported in Britain. But the Director-General of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Wakita Takaji, said on Tuesday that they have been able to trace the routes of transmission in most of the cases, and he does not believe that the variant is spreading through communities.
A report from the World Health Organization, released Wednesday, says three types of coronavirus variants are spreading around the world and have an “escape mutation,” meaning they could conceivably evade vaccines or immunity to the original virus. The WHO says it plans to conduct additional studies on the vaccines’ efficacy against variants.
Researchers at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases have developed a way to temporarily encounter variant strains. In the past, researchers had to decode all the genetic data in a sample. There is now a PCR test for this. Public fitness institutes in Japan already use this new method.