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

Day 760 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

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

Entry into Japan of foreign tourists will restart from June 10

And the 9pm bulletin last night had the covid numbers and a little additional info.

Photo 2a

31008 new cases confirmed

[vs. 39642 for the same day last week. 41741 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 10 prefectures:

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

35 prefectures in triple figures

2 prefectures in double figures

Tokyo on 3391 [vs. 4172 same day last week]

Osaka on 2524 [vs. 3156 same day last week]

[Tokyo has been down vs. same day previous week for 13 straight days now]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 78

Photo 02b

The total of current active serious cases stands at 95, down 8 from the previous day.

42 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30480

Total recorded cases at 8746204

Recovered cases at 8354611 (around 40,000 recovered cases from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 361,113 (down around 9000 vs the previous day).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total is 4.12%

Photo 03

So the resumption of overseas tourism to Japan from June 10 was relegated to the business story omnibus late in the news.

Photo 04

[As we mentioned before, Japan is planning to categorize entry procedures for Japan into three groups depending on the risks supposedly associated with each country. Well, it seems here that] the resumption of tourism will only happen on June 10 for the 98 countries in the top tier, including the US, South Korea and China.

[Funny how the low risk countries also happen to be among the top customers for the Japan tourist industry…jk]

Photo 05

[Given the current cap on the numbers allowed into the country daily] tourists will only initially be allowed as part of supervised tour groups for the time being, in order to ensure they are ThorPreMe-ing.

Photo 06

From June 01, Japan will be raising its overall daily cap on entrants to the country from 10,000 to 20,000 people.

[Pictured: A tour guide gathered up the handful of US citizens who landed a few days ago for the test run of letting tourists in.]

Photo 07

These experimental tours, which are actually inviting over tour operators, will be used by the government to draw up infection prevention guidelines for the tours.

[Aloha signs being flashed. I believe the US contingent were 7 people from Hawaii and one from LA, all in the tourist industry, and quite possibly all Asian-American.]

Photo 08

On the 9pm news last night was the additional information that Kishida said that they are proceeding with preparations that will allow Chitose and Naha airports to reopen to international flights.

Photo 09

In other news from last night’s bulletin, a group of boffins has developed fully-automatic machine that can detect [covid] virus to the same level of accuracy as a PCR test.

Photo 10

And while a PCR test would take 1 hour to produce a result, this machine can do the whole process in about 9 minutes.

Photo 11

The reagents for each sample cost in the region of 250 yen a pop.

Photo 12

And in the event that a new variant comes along, they would be able to make the relevant reagents in about 3 weeks and detect that to a high level of accuracy.

Photo 13

They are hoping to get it to market this year or next year.