TOKYO: Japanese government officials are jittery in the face of criticisms over government measures against the outbreak of infections with the new COVID-19 coronavirus originating in China.

Border controls taken at the initiative of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe failed to prevent the spread of infections in Japan. Some claim that the government's decision to keep passengers on the virus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship at the port of Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, exacerbated group infections onboard.

Anxiety about the "unknown infectious disease" has been casting a shadow over public approval ratings for the Abe cabinet, raising a sense of crisis inside the government and the ruling coalition led by Abe's Liberal Democratic Party.

At a joint meeting of opposition party members held Tuesday to discuss countermeasures against the viral outbreak, Kenta Izumi, policy chief of the Democratic Party for the People, criticized the government's responses. "The government failed at border measures by trying to downplay the situation," he said.

Tokyo initially decided to conduct virus tests on only people with fever, records of traveling to China's Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, or contact with those who stayed in Wuhan.

But a number of coronavirus infection cases with no clear infection routes were detected in February. An aide to Abe said, "There should have been no other way but to refuse entry for all Chinese people starting in January, but it's too late."

Ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's planned visit to Japan as a state guest this spring, Beijing asked Tokyo to stop short of making a big thing about the situation, according to government sources. This is also believed to have led to the delayed responses.

On countermeasures at the Diamond Princess cruise ship, a senior government official rebutted criticism, saying, "It would have caused a panic if all 3,700 (passengers and crew members) were allowed to leave the ship at the beginning."

Still, a cabinet minister said, "We should have quickly disembarked and quarantined (the people onboard), but there was no facility to accommodate all of them."

Opinion polls have shown falls in public support for the Abe cabinet amid the parliamentary grillings of Abe over a controversial publicly funded cherry blossom-viewing party hosted by the prime minister.

Senior government officials have been disappointed by fading hopes that effective responses to the coronavirus outbreak would demonstrate the government's crisis management capability and shore up the public approval ratings.

LDP General Council Chairman Shunichi Suzuki told a press conference on Tuesday, "The public does not necessarily give positive assessments to the government's measures."

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a separate news conference, "We will thoroughly look back on the positive and negative aspects of (our measures) and reflect this in future efforts."

JIJI Press