Coronavirus: Tokyo’s nightlife districts linked to rise in virus patients in their 30s and 40s
- Kazuhiro Tateda, who is advising Japan’s government on Covid-19, said infections were spreading in districts like Shinjuku, Ginza and Roppongi
- Tokyo has seen a spike in cases and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned the country was ‘barely holding the line’
Kazuhiro Tateda, president of the Japan Association of Infectious Diseases and a member of the committee set up by the government to combat the spread of the virus, said infections were “spreading seriously in nightlife districts such as Shinjuku, Ginza and Roppongi”.
He made a link between this development and reports of more infections among people in their 30s and 40s. Nearly 600 of the more than 2,000 cases in Japan are in Tokyo, which has a population of 14 million. Government figures showed that 40 per cent of the 416 people who tested positive in the capital in recent days were aged between their late teens and 40s.
“This is related to nightlife,” said Tateda. “This is a very busy district of nightclubs where people are close together and that is popular with middle-aged men.”
Kenichi Yoshizumi, the mayor of Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward that houses the Kabuki-cho red light district, said medical facilities there were on the verge of being “overwhelmed”, and echoed earlier calls by Tokyo’s Governor Yuriko Koike for people to stay away from nightlife outlets.