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TOKYO: The COVID-19 situation in Tokyo is serious and could erupt in the next few days just as Japan begins its New Year holiday period, in which millions of people usually move through the country, the city governor said on Wednesday (December 30).
The capital registered 944 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, just below the record of 949 registered on Saturday, and medical experts warned that unless the outbreak is brought under control, the city could soon receive more than 1,000 new patients per day.
“Please emphasize life over fun,” Governor Yuriko Koike told a news conference, asking people to stay home as much as possible during the holidays.
Tokyo is at a critical juncture, with a cold weather forecast in winter and highly contagious variant strains of the coronavirus from Great Britain and South Africa already detected in Japan, Koike said.
“The situation is extremely serious, we are facing a huge wave of virus cases that we have not seen before,” he added.
“The number of cases could explode at any time. Any of us could get infected at any time … If we don’t eliminate this now, we will be facing a much worse situation.”
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Some 3,400 people had died in Japan from the coronavirus in total as of Tuesday night, out of about 227,390 cases, NHK public television said.
Japan on Monday detected a variant of coronavirus found in South Africa, the government said, the first such discovery in a nation that has already identified more than a dozen cases of another variant that is spreading rapidly in Britain.
The announcement of the detection of the South African-linked variant comes after the Japanese government began banning the entry of non-resident foreign nationals on Monday following the discovery of the UK variant in Japan.
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Japan has agreements to purchase 120 million doses of COVID-19 from Pfizer-BioNTech in the first half of 2021 and 120 million from AstraZeneca, the first 30 million to be shipped in March 2021, and 250 million from Novavax.
It is also in talks with Johnson & Johnson and has an agreement with Shionogi & Co Ltd.
Experts said vaccine manufacturers would need to conduct at least phase I and II trials in Japan before applying for approval for use.
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