San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Japan eases bar on entry, giving tourism a boost
Japan has eased its border restrictions for foreign tourists and has begun accepting visa applications, but only for those on guided package tours who are willing to follow maskwearing and other antivirus measures as the country cautiously tries to balance business and infection worries. The Japan Tourism Agency says tours are being accepted from 98 countries and regions, including the United States, Britain, China, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore, which are deemed as having low infection risks.
“We expect the resumption of inbound tourism will help stimulate the local economy,” said Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Tetsuo Saito. “We will continue to make effort to recover demand for tourism while balancing anti-infection measures and social and economic activities.”
Under the guidelines, participants are requested to wear face masks most of the time and to purchase insurance to cover medical costs in case they contract COVID-19. The rules don’t set a cap for the number of people in one group, but tour guides must be present throughout the tour.
After facing criticism that its strict border controls were xenophobic, Japan began easing restrictions earlier this year. On June 1, it doubled its cap on daily entries to 20,000 people a day, including Japanese citizens, foreign students and some business travelers.
Business groups based in Japan representing the Group of Seven countries and the
European Union welcomed Japan’s gradual resumption of foreign tourism in a joint statement, but called on the government to “to further ease border control measures to facilitate an environment where people, goods, money and digital technologies can move freely, thus advancing Japan’s economic growth.”
They called on Japan to follow examples of other G-7 countries and resume individual tourism, eliminate testing at airports, lift the daily entry cap and resume international flights at more than a dozen regional airports.
Japan is still reporting more than 10,000 new COVID-19 cases daily. The latest maskwearing rules call for people to wear coverings on public transportation systems, in hospitals and in other public facilities.
Masked visitors arrive Friday at Narita International Airport in Japan. The nation is easing border restrictions as it cautiously tries to balance economic needs with infection concerns.
of recycling and burning to generate power.”
“The costs and environmental impact of disposing of the excess and unusable PPE is unclear,” the committee noted.
Pat Cullen, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, a professional body, accused the government of “sending billions of pounds up in smoke.”
Opposition Laborr Party lawmaker Meg Hillier, who chairs the committee, said the PPE saga was “perhaps the most shameful episode in the U.K. government response to the pandemic.”
“The government splurged huge amounts of money, paying obscenely inflated prices and payments to middlemen in a chaotic rush, during which they chucked out even the most cursory due diligence,” she said.
Government minister Robin Walker acknowledged that “mistakes were made” early in the pandemic. But he said it was “a totally unprecedented situation” in which countries around the world were scrambling
to acquire supplies during a health crisis.
data from health records of deliveries that took place in eight medical centers in Massachusetts in the early months of the pandemic, between March and September 2020. The records tracked the babies’ development for a year after birth, looking for specific codes that would indicate a diagnosis of a developmental disorder related to motor function, speech or language, among other things.
The researchers found that among 7,550 babies whose mothers were infection-free during their pregnancies, 3% were diagnosed with a brain development disorder before their first birthdays. Among the 222 babies who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in utero, 6.3% received a diagnosis by the time they turned 1.
“This should be another wake-up call for pregnant women to get vaccinated, and boosted, and stay masked and take as many precautions as they can,” said Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf of the University of Washington Medicine.