Japan: Around 600 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Okinawa Prefecture on Wednesday, It is the first time the daily tally top so high since Aug. 28 of last year.
Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki said Tuesday that he was considering asking the government to place the southern prefecture in a COVID-19 pre-emergency stage, in the face of a fresh surge in new infections there. At a news conference, Tamaki revealed that he had held talks on the matter with Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno. “If we make the request, we hope that (the central government) would consider it promptly,” he said.
The governor stressed that the prefecture is now believed to have “already entered the sixth wave” of infections. He said it shouldn’t be the kind of situation in which activating pre-emergency measures in Okinawa could take as long as a week, considering that infections were spreading at an “unusual” speed.
“We want (the prefecture) to proceed with inoculations for unvaccinated people and give early booster shots to elderly people and medical workers,” Matsuno said.
