Photo/Illutration Toshio Nakagawa, head of the Japan Medical Association, addresses the need to expand the state of emergency to prefectures across Japan at a news conference in Tokyo on Jan. 13. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The head of the Japan Medical Association (JMA) is warning it would be premature to lift the state of emergency in effect for Tokyo and 10 prefectures on the day it is set to expire.

“Lifting the declaration on Feb. 7 is unrealistic,” Toshio Nakagawa, JMA president, said at a news conference on Jan. 27, in a call for the central government to extend the state of emergency and to adopt stronger criteria for lifting it.

The Tokyo metropolitan government announced on Jan. 27 that it confirmed fewer than 1,000 new patients infected with the novel coronavirus in the capital. But Nakagawa warned that people “should not be relieved” by the relatively lower numbers.

“Some people seem to have the impression that there are far fewer new cases now, but that’s because they have become numb to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Nakagawa said. “The recent numbers of new patients are still several times more than they were when the first state of emergency was declared last spring or during the summer.”

At an Upper House Budget Committee meeting held the same day, Yasutoshi Nishimura, the state minister in charge of economic revitalization and responding to the coronavirus crisis, laid out the government’s criteria for lifting the state of emergency.

“We will make a comprehensive decision on the timing, partly based on the Stage 3 indicators,” he said. Stage 3 is the second-worst category in the government’s four-stage scale for gauging the seriousness of the outbreak.

Nishimura said that six indicators, including the hospital bed occupancy rate and the number of recuperating patients, will need to drop from Stage 4 to Stage 3.

Nakagawa quoted Nishimura’s remarks and said, “We need to lift the state of emergency as carefully as possible.”

He suggested the health care system should show more signs of improvement before deciding to lift the declaration.

Nakagawa said the state of emergency should be lifted when all the six indicators “drop to the Stage 2 level, or at least are certain to drop to Stage 2.”

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