Story at a glance
- New coronavirus cases in Japan have reached unprecedented levels while hitting an all-time high in Tokyo, officials said Wednesday.
- Infections reached a new daily high in Tokyo Wednesday at 4,166 cases as the delayed Tokyo Olympics reached the middle of its second full week.
- More than 300 people affiliated with the Olympic games have tested positive for COVID-19.
New coronavirus cases in Japan have reached unprecedented levels while hitting an all-time high in Tokyo, officials said Wednesday.
Japanese Health Minister Norihisa Tamura attributed the surge to the delta variant, saying new infections have reached a point “unseen in the past,” Reuters reported. Tamura has urged citizens with mild symptoms to stay home and isolate instead of further crowding the nation’s hospitals as new cases nationwide eclipsed 14,000.
“The pandemic has entered a new phase … Unless we have enough beds, we can’t bring people to hospital. We’re acting pre-emptively on this front,” Tamura told parliament, according to Reuters.
“If things don’t turn out as we expect, we can roll back the policy,” Tamura added.
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Meanwhile, infections reached a new daily high in Tokyo at 4,166 cases as the delayed Tokyo Olympics reached the middle of its second full week. But officials, including Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, have said there is no definitive link between the ongoing Olympics and the outbreak.
The Olympic organizing committee revealed a new cluster of cases Wednesday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases among people affiliated with the games to more than 300, according to Kyodo news.
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Yet Shigeru Omi, a top medical adviser to the Japanese government, reportedly told parliament Wednesday that continuing the games despite continually growing cases might have seemingly given permission to citizens to relax their stance on government COVID-19 policies.
“Political leaders are sending out messages to the public in earnest but probably not as strongly and consistently as hoped,” Omi said. “We’re seeing COVID-19 clusters emerge more broadly including at schools and offices.”
Japan has fully vaccinated nearly 31 percent of its citizens with more than 96 million doses administered. There have been 957,791 cases and 15,232 deaths due to COVID-19 in Japan to date, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
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