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

Saturday am stuff brought to you on Saturday evening.

Day 754 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

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

Government announces its [latest] thinking on masks

This morning’s show had the numbers too.

Photo 2a

37438 new cases confirmed

[vs. 39647 for the same day last week. 21628 the same day two weeks ago.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.

No new daily case records.

Nowhere with five digits

Quadruple figures in 12 prefectures:

Okinawa, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Osaka, Aichi, Shizuoka, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba and Hokkaido

34 prefectures in triple figures

1 prefecture in double figures

Tokyo on 3573 [vs. 4109 same day last week]

Osaka on 2991 [vs. 3210 same day last week]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 89

Photo 02b

The total of current active serious cases stands at 106, down 4 from the previous day.

44 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30273

Total recorded cases at 8561791

Recovered cases at 8131682 (around 34,000 recovered cases from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 399,836 (up around 3000 vs the previous day).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total is 4.67%

Photo 03

Here is the government’s [latest] thinking on wearing masks.

Photo 04

If you keep social distance of 2m or more, you don’t need to wear a mask (unless you are having a conversation indoors).

Photo 05

[Even if you are outside and] even if you are unable to keep social distance, you don’t need to wear masks in situations where you are mostly not talking.

[Basically, the idea here is actually if you are walking to the train station alone to go to work and not talking to anyone, you don’t need a mask here.]

Photo 06

But in other situations, wearing masks is recommended.

Photo 07

For example, if you are on the train and you cannot maintain social distance, they recommend masks even if you are not talking much.

Photo 08

But for those between age 2 and school age, they will no longer ask children to uniformly wear masks, regardless of their ability to social distance. [Kids were asked in February to wear masks from 2 years old when omicron came along.]