TOKYO, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- The Tokyo metropolitan government on Tuesday said elderly people are contracting COVID-19 at an "unprecedented" rate as the Omicron variant runs rampant across Japan.
Patients aged 65 or above comprised 8.5 percent of the 127,357 new infections reported in Tokyo for the week through Monday, according to official figures.
For those seven days, the total number of elderly people carrying the coronavirus was 2.1 times higher than that of the entire month of August, when Japan was grappling with its fifth wave of infections, the metropolitan government said.
The number of infected elderly patients in the same week was also 1.4 times higher compared to the previous week and three times higher than the week before, it added.
As 12,211 new cases were confirmed on Monday, the highest for any Monday in the capital, and 68,000 new daily cases were reported nationwide, the infections barely showed any sign of letting up. Those aged over 70 are the majority of those being hospitalized with serious symptoms.
On Friday, Takaji Wakita, who heads a group of experts advising the Japanese Health Ministry on its pandemic response, urged the government to focus on reducing the infection rate among both the elderly and children.
"The number of novel coronavirus cases is starting to decline among young generations, but unless we see a downtrend among children and elderly people, the overall figures will not decline," Wakita said.
BOOSTER SHOTS
In terms of the government's booster shot drive, Wakita said the third shots were of paramount importance as part of the country's overall fight against different variants.
Japanese Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto, for his part, told a press conference that Japan needed to "push forward with encouraging children to wear face masks."
In a bid to speed up yet another inexplicably sluggish vaccine rollout, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday said he has put into action plans to rapidly increase the number of booster shots available to combat the highly-transmissible Omicron variant that is wreaking havoc on the country.
At a budget meeting of the lower house of parliament on Monday, Kishida said he has informed his ministers to quickly increase the number of booster shots being administered to 1 million per day.
"By setting a clear goal, the government as a whole will work to deliver shots to those who hope to be vaccinated as soon as possible," Kishida told the parliamentary session.
He said he has told his ministers to urge local governments to expedite the distribution of vaccination coupons to the public and to set up more vaccination centers.
TRAVEL ADVISORY
Japan is racing against time to advance its delayed booster shot campaign as the country has been recording daily new infections of 100,000 recently.
Meanwhile, the United States has begun advising its citizens not to travel to Japan amid surging COVID-19 cases.
The new advisory is the highest since June last year, when Japan was similarly grappling with its fifth wave of the coronavirus and sluggish vaccine response.
Local reports here said the advisory was based on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s reconsideration of the rate of virus in Japan, which reads "Very high," the highest on the CDC's scale, one notch higher than its previous health notice. ■