Japan widens state of emergency to three more regions

Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on Friday officially announced that three more prefectures - Hokkaido, Okayama, and Hiroshima - will be placed under a COVID-19 state of emergency due to a recent spike in infections.

"Today, we decided to add Hokkaido, Okayama and Hiroshima to the area under the state of emergency from May 16 to 31," Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced at a virus task-force meeting.

The fresh declaration came just 10 weeks before the pandemic-delayed Olympic Games, scheduled to start on July 23.

On April 25, Japan had already placed Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures under virus emergency and those areas will also come out of the alert on May 31.

(Cover: A woman in kimono clad and pedestrians wearing protective face masks make their way at a shopping district on the first day of the country's third state of emergency, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, in Tokyo, Japan, April 25, 2021. /Reuters)