Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike on Tuesday announced a revision to the city’s guidelines on monitoring the ongoing spread of the novel coronavirus, putting more weight on the city’s health care system capacity when deciding to implement business closure requests and other virus countermeasures should they need to be restored.
The original guidelines put forward in May focused on new and untraceable cases measured on a weekly basis, as well as the number of COVID-19 patients in the city’s hospitals. The new guidelines will continue to reference case numbers but will shift the emphasis to whether hospitals are capable of accepting more patients. But it does not present numerical thresholds in those categories.
Specifically, the updated guideline will focus on seven criteria: