Shigeru Omi, head of the central government panel of experts responding to the coronavirus pandemic, explains the situation in Osaka Prefecture at the Lower House’s Health, Labor and Welfare Committee on April 14. (Koichi Ueda) Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga came under fire for rejecting the views of leading scientists, including the chief of the government’s expert panel, that a new wave of COVID-19 cases is hitting Japan. “There is no doubt that Japan is entering the fourth wave of infections,” Shigeru Omi, an infectious disease expert who heads the government panel to respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic, said at the Lower House’s Health, Labor and Welfare Committee on April 14.