TOKYO: The Tokyo metropolitan government plans to rent more hotel rooms to accommodate up to about 3,000 coronavirus carriers with no or mild symptoms.

The move is designed to secure more hospital beds for severely ill patients as the rapidly growing number of COVID-19 patients in Tokyo has pushed the Japanese capital into the brink of medical collapse.

So far, the metropolitan government has secured about 2,000 hospital beds for coronavirus patients.  But a surge in the number of infection cases in Tokyo, which stood at 2,446 on a cumulative basis as of Wednesday, has forced some virus carriers to wait at home before being hospitalized.

To achieve its goal of securing up to 4,000 hospital beds, the Tokyo government initially planned to rent hotel rooms to accommodate 1,000 coronavirus patients with no or mild symptoms.

Hotel rooms for 300 such patients have been rent so far and over 100 people have already moved in, but the Tokyo government judged that it needs to secure more rooms to cope with the increasing number of COVID-19 cases.

"We still feel the possibility of medical collapse. The medical system remains strained," Masataka Inokuchi, vice chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, said at a meeting of the metropolitan task force on the fight against the coronavirus.

JIJI Press