Japan’s PM expands state of emergency to 7 more prefectures

TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga declared a state of emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic in seven more prefectures including Osaka and Aichi on Wednesday, broadening the scope of the measure amid a resurgence of the pandemic across the country.

The newly declared prefectures, also including Tochigi to the north of Tokyo, Gifu in central Japan, Hyogo and Kyoto in the west, and Fukuoka to the southwest, will remain in the status through February. 7.

Speaking at a meeting of the government’s coronavirus task force, Suga said he felt a “strong sense of crisis”, adding that surges in cases in urban areas must be curbed and prevented from spreading to other parts of the country.

Under the state of emergency, people in the affected areas will be asked to refrain from making unnecessary trips, and restaurants and bars will be requested to close by 8:00 p.m.

Meanwhile, firms are encouraged to have employees work from home or stagger their shifts and reduce the number of staff in their offices by 70 percent. The number of spectators at live events will also be limited.

“If we work together, we can certainly turn the number of infected people into a declining one,” said Yasutoshi Nishimura, minister in charge of the government’s response to the novel coronavirus, at a lower house committee meeting earlier in the day.

However, he expressed reluctance to expand the state of emergency to the whole nation. “We have to carefully think whether we should subject areas to it that have kept the number of infections low,” he said.

The initial state of emergency took effect in Tokyo and the three adjacent prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa and Saitama last Friday. The emergency expansion comes after some governors of the prefectures asked the central government to expand its stateof-emergency declaration to cover their prefectures, bringing the total number of prefectures under the state of emergency to 11, which covers more than half of the country’s population and around 60 percent of its economy.