Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Jan. 31 (The Asahi Shimbun)

Tokyo tallied 11,751 fresh COVID-19 cases on Jan. 31, a record for a Monday, metropolitan health officials said.

The daily case count for the previous Monday was 8,503.

The capital also recorded one new death related to the disease. The patient who died was a woman in her 90s, officials said.

The daily average of new cases over the week until Jan. 31 was 15,163.9, compared with 8,585.3 for the preceding week.

The number of patients on ventilators or ECMO heart-bypass machines--the cases the metropolitan government define as serious--rose three from the previous day to 26.

As of Jan. 31, the occupancy rate of hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 patients was 49.2 percent.

The metropolitan government has said it will consider asking the central government to declare a state of emergency if the rate hits 50 percent.

But Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Jan. 31 said the central government is not weighing the option for the capital at this moment.

“We will assess the effect of pre-emergency measures and keep watching the situation so we can make a decision while we take into account other factors and work with the local government,” he told reporters.

Kishida noted that fewer than half of hospital beds set out for severely ill patients with COVID-19 in Tokyo have been occupied in the current wave of infections driven by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, although they were full in August at the peak of the last wave of infections fueled by Delta.

In Osaka Prefecture, 6,243 new cases were reported on the same day, also a record for a Monday.

Prefectural officials said there were four new deaths.

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