The number of people infected with the coronavirus in Tokyo will return to the 1,000-per-day level in about 45 days if measures to contain the virus are relaxed when the number of new infections per day falls below 500, according to an estimate presented at a meeting of an advisory body of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry on Wednesday.
Tokyo is currently under a state of emergency scheduled to last through Feb. 7.
The estimate was presented by Hiroshi Nishiura, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Kyoto University. Nishiura estimated the infection situation based on the assumption that the effective reproduction number, which indicates how many people are infected by one person, was about 1.1 before the state of emergency declaration was issued.
If the effective reproduction number drops by 20% to 0.88 due to the declaration, the number of infected people per day will fall below 500 in late February. If the declaration is lifted at that time, the number of infected people per day could exceed 1,000 again by mid-April, he said.
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