Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addresses a news conference on March 16. (Pool)

The government will no longer require businesses to identify employees who came into close contact with those who tested positive for the novel coronavirus at the workplace.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said March 16 that the easing of the anti-virus measure is aimed at ensuring business continuity rather than carrying on with a situation where countless people are unable to report to work after being deemed to be close contacts.

Kishida also said the government will lift its COVID-19 pre-emergency measures in all 18 prefectures as scheduled on March 21.

“We are now near the end of the sixth wave (of infections),” the prime minister said at a news conference. “We will work hard to enable people to return to their normal life as much as possible while ensuring their safety for the time being.”

The government will start by limiting the target of who should be identified as close contacts to maintain social and economic activity.

Businesses are currently being asked to voluntarily identify close contacts at the workplace to ease the burden of public health centers.

The government decided to require close contacts to be identified only at medical institutions, facilities for the elderly and households and exempt companies from doing so while the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus remains the dominant strain in Japan.

It will be left to the discretion of municipalities to decide whether to identify close contacts at day care centers and schools.

The central government will also shorten the self-quarantine period required for close contacts. Even those other than designated essential workers will be allowed to end their self-isolation on the fifth day if they test negative for the virus on the fourth and fifth days by using test kits.

Kishida also revealed that the government will purchase an additional 75 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 70 million doses of the Moderna vaccine in preparation for a possible fourth rollout of COVID-19 vaccine shots.

The government will expand a local tourism-promotion campaign from prefectures to wider regional blocs, such as Kanto and Kinki, on April 1 with the apparent aim of eventually resuming the Go To Travel campaign, which was suspended in late 2020 following a surge in new COVID-19 cases.

(This article was written by Keishi Nishimura and Yuki Edamatsu.)

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