10 June 2022, Friday– Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

Day 774 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

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

Today marks the first day of overseas tourists being officially allowed back into the country.

There were the usual interviews with tourism-related businesses looking forward to making some money, a look at tour companies adapting to the new guidelines, and of course a look at how ThorPreMe will be enforced…

Photo 2a

[Taken from last night’s 9pm bulletin]

16813 new cases confirmed

[vs. 20680 for the same day last week. 31008 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 3 prefectures:

Okinawa, Osaka, Tokyo

35 prefectures in triple figures

9 prefectures in double figures

Tokyo on 1876 [vs. 2335 same day last week]

Osaka on 1419 [vs. 1531 same day last week]

[Tokyo has been down vs. same day previous week for 27 straight days now]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 19.

[This is pretty high considering border testing was relaxed even as double the number of people are being allowed into the country from June 01.]

Photo 02b

[Taken from last night’s 9pm bulletin]

The total of current active serious cases stands at 77, down 2 from the previous day.

23 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30860

Total recorded cases at 9011259 [yep, we topped 9 million cases (about 7.5% of the population if we ignore reinfections) without any comment whatsoever]

Recovered cases at 8782403 (around 25,000 recovered cases from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 197,996 (down around 9000 vs the previous day and falling below 200,000).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 2.19%.

*250k case benchmarking

That’s 9 million historical cases now. We were at 1.7 million on Jan 01. 7.3 million cases have happened in just 5-and-a-bit months in 2022.

Let’s do a rough 250k benchmark (looking only that the figures for this year)…

We reached 1750k on Jan 09

We reached 2000k on Jan 21 (12 days)

We reached 2250k on Jan 26 (5 days)

We reached 2500k on Jan 29 (3 days)

We reached 2750k on Feb 02 (3 days)

We reached 3000k on Feb 04 (2 days)

We reached 3250k on Feb 07 (3 days)

We reached 3500k on Feb 10 (3 days)

We reached 3750k on Feb 12 (2 days)

We reached 4000k on Feb 16 (4 days)

We reached 4250k on Feb 18 (2 days)

We reached 4500k on Feb 22 (4 days)

We reached 4750k on Feb 25 (3 days)

We reached 5000k on Mar 01 (4 days)

We reached 5250k on Mar 05 (4 days)

We reached 5500k on Mar 10 (5 days)

We reached 5750k on Mar 14 (4 days)

We reached 6000k on Mar 19 (5 days)

We reached 6250k on Mar 26 (5 days)

We reached 6500k on Mar 31 (5 days)

We reached 6750k on Apr 06 (6 days)

We reached 7000k on Apr 10 (4 days)

We reached 7250k on Apr 16 (6 days)

We reached 7500k on Apr 22 (6 days)

We reached 7750k on Apr 28 (6 days)

We reached 8000k on May 06 (8 days)

We reached 8250k on May 13 (7 days)

We reached 8500k on May 20 (9 days)

We reached 8750k on May 28 (8 days)

We reached 9000k on June 10 (13 days)

[That’s the first time to take double-digit days to make a 250k increase since Jan 21.]

Looking at 500k increments, it might be slightly more accurate to say it took 8 days to go from 2000-2500k and 5 days to go from 2500-3000k, 6 days to reach 3500k, 4000k and 4500k, 7 days to reach 5000k, 9 days to reach 5500k, 9 days to reach 6000k, 10 days to reach 6500k, 10 days to reach 7000k, 12 days to reach 7500k, 14 days to reach 8000k, 16 days to reach 8500k and 21 days to reach 9000k.

Looking at 1 million case increments: 2 million to 3 million took 13 days. 2.5 million to 3.5 million took 11 days, 3 million to 4 million took 12 days, 3.5 million to 4.5 million took 12 days, 4 million to 5 million took 13 days, 4.5 million to 5.5 million took 16 days, 5 million to 6 million took 18 days, 5.5 million to 6.5 million took 19 days, 6 million to 7 million took 22 days, 6.5 million to 7.5 million took 22 days, 7 million to 8 million took 26 days, 7.5 million to 8.5 million took 30 days, 8 million to 9 million took 37 days.

Photo 03

And so, foreign tourism officially restarts in Japan from today.

The tourists will be part of 20,000 entrants cap on coming to Japan each day (which includes all Japanese people coming back into the country, long-term foreign residents, workers, students, etc.).

[Expect this to ramp up very quickly though. Japan is super-keen to take some of the sting out of the situation with the crazy cheap yen by grabbing those tourist dollars.]

Tourists are allowed from 98 countries [those in “Group1” on Japan’s risk list]

Tourism will be limited to completely supervised guided tours – no free roaming time.

Photo 04

The 7am bulletin commemorated this with a live segment with a young ricksaw puller.

[Why they risked doing this live is beyond me. All kinds of things could go wrong, and there is no particular payoff that couldn’t be achieved via pre-recording.]

Photo 05

[Foreign tourists used to make up 30% of the trade for Asakusa rickshaws.]

The association has released a guide to dealing with foreign tourists with all the key English in it. [This is labeled as an association internal secret, so unfortunately we won’t get to check the contents unless someone leaks them…]

Photo 06

The puller has some handy laminated charts on hand…

Photo 07

And please click this video [with sound] for a demonstration of how the conversation with foreign tourists will go down.

Photo 08

[They interviewed various people in foreign countries about wanting to come to Japan.] This girl in China used to come to Japan once a month to see her favorite idol group.

Photo 09

[Can anybody read the group name on that fan?]

Anyway, she will have to wait due to China’s continued Zero-Covid policy.

Photo 10

“I want to go to concerts and see [my favorite] idols. And I also want to eat beef tongue, I love it.”

Photo 11

[Tour companies have been planning itineraries that balance showing people the Japanese sights and not letting them have any free time, and also ThorPreMe-ing them to death. But…]

So far, they have only had a few inquiries from overseas, and all of them for next Spring.

Photo 12

Coming to Japan as a tourist requires jumping through several hoops – getting a visa and registering your details on the ERFS system among them.

[The guy they interviewed here said that a group of tourists from Singapore had had to cancel this week as they couldn’t get visas on time. I think they said getting a visa takes about a month.]

Photo 13

Japanese people are also keen to head out to other countries. This is the queue outside the South Korean embassy of people trying to get visas.

Photo 14

“We are going around the start of next month…to get plastic surgery.”

Photo 15

South Korea started offering tourist visas again from June 01 [and have been doing what they can to keep the process speedy and smooth].

Photo 16

Other countries are easing their entry requirements.

Italy is basically dropping any quarantine if you show you have been 3-times vaxxed from this month.

Thailand is basically exempting everybody from quarantine [unconditionally] from this month.

However, there are still countries with restrictions on entry for tourists.

Photo 17

37 countries still have restrictions on entry into their country from Japan.

158 countries still have “restrictions of movement” for people coming in from Japan.

[Presumably this means some kind of quarantining or monitoring?]

Photo 18

Domestic travel now…

ANA says that it won’t reduce the number of flights in July and August this year – it will go back to the schedule of a regular year.

Photo 19

JAL has a similar plan to restore most of its pre-Covid schedule.

Photo 20

Tokyo is restarting its “Tokyo citizen travel discount” which provides subsidies for travel WITHIN Tokyo by Tokyo citizens, from today through to the end of July.

Photo 21

To qualify you have to be 3-times vaxxed and [or?] show proof of a negative test.

Photo 22

For overnight stays costing 6000 yen or more, the subsidy is 5000 yen per person.

For day trips costing 3000 yen or more, the subsidy is 2500 yen.