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

Day 780 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01

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

Nothing specifically covid in the 7am bulletin (FRB raises US interest rates, end of support for Internet Explorer, and you are about to be exposed to Upper House election campaign misery) but I scraped today’s story and numbers from the 9pm news last night.

Photo 2a

But first the numbers:

16592 new cases confirmed

[vs. 18416 for the same day last week. 22768 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

37 prefectures in triple figures

7 prefectures in double figures

Tokyo on 2015 [vs. 1935 same day last week]

Osaka on 1320 [vs. 1644 same day last week]

[Yep, Tokyo broke its streak of 33 straight days down vs. same day previous week.]

The number of positives at immigration testing was 12

[Border testing was relaxed even as double the number of people are being allowed into the country from June 01.]

Photo 02b

The total of current active serious cases stands at 53, down 8 vs. the previous day.

23 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30978.

[Looks Iike I’ll be benchmarking another 1000 tomorrow.]

Total recorded cases at 9095432.

Recovered cases at 8897201 (around 17,000 recovered cases up from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 167,253 (down around 700 vs the previous day.

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 1.83%.

Photo 03

[So, in yesterday’s piece, I mentioned that a government panel had pointed out areas that need improving in future pandemic responses. With covid not actually gone away, and the UK entering a wave with BA.4 and BA.5 (if my memory serves), the 9pm bulletin was saying that now is the time, with the current lull, to be taking action.

They looked at one aspect of the report: The disparity between the number of hospital and clinics that the country has vs. how many of them actually helped out with covid (with a view to taking the pressure of the Welfare Centers, etc.).]

This graph shows that there are 110,000 clinics and GPs in the country, but the numbers of these that were actually helping out with covid diagnosis and patient monitoring was as you see in the orange (green?) bits:10% around November of last year, rising to 20% in April of this year during the Omicron peak.

[This graph brought to you by Pritt Stick.]

Photo 04

[The show looked into the whys of this. Here is one example they gave.]

This guy’s clinic is actually on the ground floor of a residential apartment building.

Photo 05

The doctor was considering doing fever consultations, and he wanted to use the back door of his clinic as the entrance for fever patients…

Photo 06

…but the door opens up into a corridor that is also an entrance for building residents which would mean he would have created a communal area where fever and covid patients ran into residents.

[I left this photo in the sequence, specifically because I have never seen the katakana word “batting” used in this way before.

Wait, I have just looked into this further. Due to the paucity of vowel sounds in Japanese, it seems that “butting” is meant here, like butting heads in boxing.]

Photo 07

Other examples of why clinics said it was difficult to deal with covid patients:

It is a one-doctor operation for consultations, so the doc did not have any slack in their schedule for dealing with covid patients.

The doctor was old, and therefore at high risk if the event that they were infected.

The clinic itself is small and so hard to take to take infection prevention measures.

[My local children’s clinic put up a little tent in their front yard for seeing fever patients.]

Photo 08

This doctor on the report panel reckons that up to 80-90% of medical institutions would actually be able to offer support if legal obligations were also included.

Photo 09

He says that the government may need to think about being brining a little coercion to bear in future scenarios.