Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida attends a Lower House Budget Committee session on Feb. 18. (Naoko Kawamura)

The government shifted gears in deciding to extend pre-emergency measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic by two weeks instead of the three that had been the norm.

The Feb. 18 decision followed internal discussions about what would be appropriate as cases of the Omicron variant are generally falling nationwide.

It was decided to extend the measures by two weeks, until March 6, for 16 prefectures: Hokkaido, Aomori, Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Ishikawa, Nagano, Shizuoka, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Saga and Kagoshima. The same deadline was also extended for Wakayama Prefecture in southeastern Japan, which originally faced a Feb. 27 deadline.

“Experts pointed out that the peak in infections had passed and that the general trend is a decline in new cases,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said during a Feb. 18 news conference to explain the two-week extension.

In the past two extensions of pre-emergency curbs, the Kishida administration set the period at three weeks. That generally was also applied whenever a region was newly confirmed to be facing a health crisis.

Matsuno explained that was because two weeks would be required for the steps to take effect and another week to confirm if they were proving effective.

But this time around, close associates of Kishida called for a shorter extension since the pace of new cases had slowed. One aide pointed out that a shorter extension would go down well with a public weary of on-off restrictions over the past two years.

Some of the regions that had faced a Feb. 20 deadline griped that a three-week extension would be too long.

The latest decision means that the 17 prefectures concerned would have the same March 6 deadline as 14 other prefectures, including Tokyo and its three neighboring prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa and Saitama.

That gives the Kishida administration the option of scoring political mileage by being able to lift curbs simultaneously for a large number of prefectures. Pre-emergency measures are set to end on Feb. 20 for five prefectures, the first time that will happen since Kishida took office last October.

While some government officials pointed out that the precedent until now had been three weeks, the decision for a two-week period was bolstered by a comment at a Feb. 16 meeting of a panel of experts advising the health ministry that the peak in new cases was reached in early February.

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