19 May 2022, Thursday — Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

Day 752 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

Japan covid-related topics in NHK’s 7am news bulletin today:

Border restrictions to be eased in line with [a country’s] positive case rate

Couldn’t find the numbers on any of the bulletins so those are taken from the website.

Photo 2a

[Taken from the NHK website]

42161 new cases confirmed

[vs. 45955 for the same day last week. 26469 the same day two weeks ago.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.

I can’t tell from the website whether there are any new daily case records.

Nowhere with five digits

Quadruple figures in 13 prefectures:

Okinawa [over 2500 again], Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Osaka, Kyoto, Aichi, Shizuoka, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba and Hokkaido

34 prefectures in triple figures

0 prefectures in double figures

Tokyo on 4355 [vs. 4764 same day last week]

Osaka on 3497 [vs. 3679 same day last week]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 83

Photo 02b

[Taken from the NHK website]

The total of current active serious cases stands at 125, down 2 from the previous day.

50 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30193

Total recorded cases at 8484732

Recovered cases at 8051913 (around 35,000 recovered cases from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 402,626 (up around 6000 vs the previous day).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total is 4.74%

Photo 03

With the cap on the number of entrants to Japan set to be raised to 20,000 a day from next month, the government has indicated it would like to ease testing measures at airports.

Photo 04

The government is looking to [deal with entrants from different countries differently] and will decide those countries based on the rate of positive cases those countries [have] produce[d] on entry in Japan.

Photo 05

The government is looking to split the world’s countries into three groups.

The group of countries with the lowest positive test rates will be exempt from testing at the border or home quarantine even if they have not had their third booster shot.

Photo 06

Based on the government’s calculations so far, this would apply to around 100 countries including the US and the UK.

Photo 07

The second group would be exempt from border testing etc. on condition of having had your third jab. This would apply to around 90 countries including Egypt and Vietnam.

Photo 08

The group with the highest positive test ratio would continue to need border testing, etc.

This would apply to only a handful of countries.

Photo 09

Moving on to the topic of wearing masks, the government says that at this point in time it has not received any scientific evidence that would change the way of current way of thinking on the topic.

Photo 10

However, for preschoolers of 2 years old and up, they are discussing whether to revise the recommendation to mask up that was temporarily in place due to the spread of omicron.

[I am pretty sure I posted an article a couple of days ago where Kishida explicitly denied the government were thinking of doing this. I’ll go back and have a look for it.]

Photo 11

Anyhoo, the MHLW expert panel is going to discuss this question.