Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is scheduled to give a news conference at 6pm local time (9am GMT) on Thursday that Kyodo said was likely to address both the spread of coronavirus and how to deal with inflation touched off by the weak yen and higher fuel prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The number of new cases is rising in every prefecture in Japan, and it seems to be rapidly spreading,” Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto said at the start of a committee meeting on dealing with the coronavirus.
“There’s likely to be a further impact from the upcoming three-day weekend and summer vacation,” he said.
Separately, land and transport minister Tetsuo Saito, whose portfolio also includes tourism, said this is not the time to start a system of support and subsidies for domestic travel.
Japan in late 2020 launched a travel promotion programme but later abandoned it amid criticism that it had helped spread the coronavirus more widely. A similar scheme had been widely expected to start sometime later this year.
Still, Japan is not yet considering any sort of limitation on movements and activity, Economy Minister Daishiro Yamagiwa said.
The surging national cases have included people in government such as ruling party publicity head Taro Kono and Karen Makishima, head of the Digital Agency.
Leave a Reply