Japan struggles with record-setting seventh wave of Coronavirus

After some short-lived optimism that the worst of the Covid pandemic might be over, health experts are warning that the peak of the seventh wave has yet to arrive.

Tokyo: Just a few short weeks ago, coronavirus infections in Japan were hovering around the 10,000-cases-a-day level, and there was optimism across the nation that the worst of the health crisis was over and that the summer holidays would be more carefree than the last two years.

As it has done in the past, however, the virus has mutated and caused a spike in infections. On Saturday, authorities recorded a record 200,975 new cases.

Health experts say the seventh wave to wash over Japan is of the highly transmissible BA.5 omicron sub-variant of the virus, with 17 of the nation’s 47 prefectures reporting record-high case loads.

On Monday, officials confirmed that there have been a total of 11.39 million confirmed cases in Japan, a nation of 125.8 million, and 31,902 fatalities.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called for “maximum caution” among the public, but his government has stated that there are no plans at present to reintroduce the states of emergency that punctuated the first two years of the outbreak in Japan.

With the lethality of the virus declining since the earliest months of the crisis, the government is trying to balance public health concerns with the need to get the national economy back on track.