The official website for the Love Live! School Idol Festival and Love Live! School Idol Festival All-Stars smartphone games announced on Wednesday that the organizers for the games' planned "Kanshasai 2020" (Fan Appreciation 2020) event have canceled the event due to concerns over the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The games will instead have a live stream event during the event's previously scheduled dates of April 11 and 12. Additionally, the organizers are considering an alternate event and will announce details on the website and social media once it has been decided.
The organizers of the "2020 Mechademia Asia Conference: Ecologies at the Manga Museum and Kyoto Seika University" announced on Wednesday that they are postponing the conference from May 2020 to May 2021 due to concerns over COVID-19. Both the academic conference and its companion Mechademia journal deal with Asian popular culture, with an emphasis on Japanese anime, manga, and gaming. The conference normally runs every September in Minneapolis, but it also held its first Asian event in Seoul in 2011, followed by its first Tokyo and Kyoto events in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe said on February 27 that the government is asking elementary, junior high, and high schools to close until the end of spring break in early April to contain the spread of COVID-19. The government is also encouraging children and others to stay home and avoid large gatherings for the next few weeks. In March, venues, and events such as Tokyo Disneyland/DisneySea, Universal Studios Japan, Ghibli Museum, Sanrio Puro Land, NAMJATOWN, and AnimeJapan are canceled or temporarily closed.
As of Sunday, the WHO reported that Japan has 455 cases of COVID-19 with six deaths. These numbers do not include the number of cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama. That cruise ship had 696 infected passengers and seven deaths.
The first reported cases of COVID-19 were in Wuhan, China in December, and then the disease began to spread in varying rates and intensities across many parts of the globe through incubation in human hosts. The WHO declared a world health emergency on January 30. As of Sunday, the WHO reported that there are 105,586 infected individuals worldwide, with 80,859 of them in China. 3,100 individuals have died from the disease in China. The WHO raised its global risk assessment over the virus from "high" to "very high" on February 28.
Sources: Love Live! School Idol Festival game series' website, MoCa News, Mechademia via Okazu
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