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Fears creep back as Japan’s coronavirus spike traced to nightlife districts

People return to Tokyo's entertainment district - Franck Robichon/Shutterstock
People return to Tokyo's entertainment district - Franck Robichon/Shutterstock
Coronavirus Article Bar with counter ..
Coronavirus Article Bar with counter ..

Just weeks after the Japanese government lifted a nationwide state of emergency and the public breathed a sigh of relief that the country had avoided a coronavirus onslaught on the scale of the United States, Spain or the UK, concern is creeping back in.

Health authorities reported 131 new infections in Tokyo on Saturday, the number remaining above 100 cases for a third consecutive day and triggering fears that the dreaded “second wave” is about to break.

Those concerns are heightened by experts admitting their predictions that infections would taper off in the hot months of a Japanese summer were wide of the mark.

Health officials have tracked 45 per cent of the new cases have back to the city’s red light districts. They also found 70 per cent of the new diagnoses are among people in their 20s and 30s.

The finding will spark fears that the packed city centres seen in the UK this weekend could lead to a similar spike in cases.

The challenge will be to stop revellers who went out on Friday night and unwittingly contracted the virus from sharing it with thousands of fellow commuters on their way to work on Monday morning.

With fewer than 20,000 infections and fatalities standing at 976 as of Friday, Japan has fared much better than many other nations, although the reasons remain unclear.

Some have suggested it is due to the cultural mores of bowing instead of hugging and the long-established habit of wearing a mask in public, while others believe that Asiatic races have some form of built-in genetic resistance.

Another school of thought has it that the relatively low number of tests - 481,877 as of Friday in a nation of 126.5 million people, according to the health ministry - means that many asymptomatic people have yet to be diagnosed with the virus.

Whatever the cause, the national government insists that it is not planning to reintroduce a state of emergency for the capital, with the previous restrictions on bars, restaurants, sporting venues and other places where large groups of people would gather lifted after one month on May 25.

Two days prior to the “soft lockdown” being relaxed, a single case was reported in Tokyo, a city of nearly 14 million people.

Cases have risen inexorably since and suddenly spiked past the 100 level on Thursday.

“Most of these cases are related to Tokyo’s nightlife districts and the authorities are focusing their testing efforts on people who work in these areas and trying to trace their customers”, said Kazuhito Tateda, president of the Japan Association of Infectious Diseases and a member of the government committee set up to combat the spread of the virus.

“Places like Kabukicho, Shinjuku and Roppongi are quite dangerous and we are telling people that they have to be careful”, he said.

The government has issued operators of host and hostess bars with guidelines on how to protect their staff and customers, but an industry that relies on intimacy for its appeal is inevitably resistant to adopting face masks, social distancing and rubber gloves.

There are indications that similar nightlife districts in other cities are also serving as ground zero for localised clusters, with eight female staff in a hostess bar in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, also testing positive. That outbreak has been traced back to a customer who had visited the club earlier in the month.

Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor of infection control at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, also links the rise in recent cases to the June 19 lifting of restrictions on people travelling outside their home prefecture. And she concurs that younger people appear to be spreading the virus.

“We have seen the impact of lifting travel and other restrictions too early in the US”, she said. “And while the situation has not been so bad here so far, we are seeing a clear up-trend in the number of cases.”

Pointing to a cluster of infections in a retirement home in Hokkaido, one of the worst-hit regions of Japan after some of the earliest cases were linked to a Chinese tourist from Wuhan who visited in February, Prof. Tsukamoto admits, “It does make me nervous”.

“I worry that the virus is being passed on by younger people who do not know they are infected because they have no symptoms, but they are then passing it on to friends and relatives who may be more at risk”, she said.

And Prof. Tateda admits to being taken aback that case numbers have not fallen now that daytime temperatures in much of the country are now at 80 degrees fahrenheit. And he warns that bodes ill for next winter.

“We understood that rising temperatures and ultraviolet radiation from the sun would help to reduce the numbers, but that has not happened”, he said.

“Although the other argument would be that those factors have had an impact and that cases would have been far higher otherwise.

“But this does suggest we could see another wave in the late autumn and winter”, Prof. Tateda added. “If that happens and it happens at the same time as the influenza season, then that will be very dangerous”.

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