Photo/Illutration Three front rows are kept empty to lower the risk of novel coronavirus infections at the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament at Tokyo’s Ryogoku Kokugikan on March 14. (Reina Kitamura)

Tokyo confirmed 175 novel coronavirus infections on March 15, 59 more than a week ago.

The average cases per day over the week through March 15 was 287.6, representing an increase of 13.5 percent from the preceding week, metropolitan government health officials said.

The number of serious COVID-19 cases requiring ventilators or an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) device, which circulates blood through an artificial lung, was 42, up one from the previous day.

Thirty-two of the new cases were patients in their 20s, followed by 28 in their 40s and 22 in their 30s. Forty-three were 65 or older.

A new novel coronavirus variant was found in a woman in her 60s, who returned to Japan from West Africa in late February, Tokyo officials also said.

A total of 25 new variant cases have been confirmed by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Public Health, officials said.

The metropolitan government is aiming to ease the strain on the capital’s health care system by lowering the number of cases to the stage 2 level by March 21, when the current state of emergency for Tokyo and neighboring Chiba, Kanagawa and Saitama prefectures is due to be lifted.

To reach the goal, the metropolitan government says that the number of hospitalized patients in Tokyo must fall to 1,261. The total number of COVID-19 patients, including those recuperating at home and at hotels, must also be reduced to 2,088, and the number of patients with symptoms defined as serious by the central government needs to be lowered to 255. 

Tokyo met the first goal on March 14, with the number of hospitalized patients dropping to 1,250. But it still fell short of the other two targets, with 2,757 patients recuperating at hospitals and elsewhere and 257 serious cases.

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