With the steady decline in COVID-19, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently said the country would consider classifying COVID-19 as seasonal influenza, CNN reported. Kishida said he has instructed his administration and the health ministry to look into the consequences of the move. It is to be noted that the CNN report claims that Japan is still facing 1,00,000 coronavirus cases per day. Presently Covid is given second rank which is equal to Tuberculosis and Avian Influenza. In addition, officials are planning to put it on par with seasonal influenza to rank fifth, CNN quoted Japan’s health ministry as saying.
“To carry forward the efforts to ‘live with corona’ and restore Japan to normalcy, we will change various policies and measures in stages,” Kishida said. In October last year, Japan reopened its borders to foreigners which had been closed since last year. According to CNN, it ended one of the strictest border controls in the world. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that the risk of death or hospitalization from COVID-19 for most people is very low due to high levels of vaccination and population immunity from previous infections .
On the other hand, the World Health Organization still counts COVID as a pandemic and in its latest update reiterated the recommendation to wear masks for people after recent exposure or close contact with COVID-19, and ” a “crowded, closed, or poorly ventilated place” for anyone to do so. Earlier, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week called on governments to continue sharing sequencing data on the coronavirus, because This is important for detecting and tracking the emergence and spread of new variants.
However, it is understandable that countries cannot maintain the level of testing and sequencing that was in place during the Omicron variant, the WHO director said. However, we cannot ignore the hope that the threat of Covid is going away. Earlier, a Japanese health expert issued a dire warning, saying daily new coronavirus cases could rise after mid-January, possibly surpassing the previous record.
According to Toho University professor Tateda Kazuhiro, who is on the government’s coronavirus advisory panel, the daily Covid tally could reach the Japanese government’s nationwide projection of 450,000. On 6 January, the Japanese Ministry of Health confirmed 456 coronavirus-related deaths nationwide, the highest one-day toll in the country since the start of the pandemic. The earlier record was 420 on 29 December 2022.
(With inputs from ANI)