The Japanese government “is not considering excluding areas other than Tokyo at the moment” from its Go To Travel tourism promotion campaign, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday.

The top government spokesman made the remark at a press conference, indicating that urban areas such as the western prefecture of Osaka and the central prefecture of Aichi, where novel coronavirus cases are surging, will remain in the travel discount program that started on July 22.

Trips to and from Tokyo have been excluded due to the rapid increase in the number of people testing positive for the virus particularly in the Japanese capital.

On some prefectures reporting daily record-high cases of the novel coronavirus, Suga said that the present situation is different from that in April, when the government’s state of emergency over the epidemic was in place, noting that the number of infection among people aged 60 or over and that of severe cases are now relatively small.

“We are not in a situation to declare a state of emergency again to drastically restrict social and economic activities,” Suga stressed.

“We plan to intensively implement measures targeting people with higher risks of getting infected with the virus and suffering severe symptoms of the disease,” Suga added.

At a meeting of a tourism promotion strategy task force earlier on Monday, Suga expressed his hope that the Go To Travel program will be effectively used based on the government’s basic policy of balancing measures to prevent coronavirus infection and those to shore up economic activities.

JIJI Press