26 June 2022, Sunday — Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

Day 790 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 covid-y, but boy is it hot. And there was also a piece of running addiction.

Photo 2a
16593 new cases confirmed
[so this is solidly up vs. both 14837 for the same day last week, 15351 the same day two weeks ago.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.
No new daily case records (probably).

Nowhere with five digits
Quadruple figures in 4 prefectures:
Okinawa, Osaka, Tokyo, with Kanagawa rejoining
31 prefectures in triple figures
12 prefectures in double figures
Nowhere in single figures

Tokyo on 2160 [vs.1681 same day last week, quite a bit up].
Osaka on 1472 [vs. 1255 same day last week; Osaka up too]

The number of positives at immigration testing was a substantial 17
[Border testing was relaxed even as the number of people being allowed into the country has doubled from June 01.]

Photo 02b
The total of current active serious cases stands at 36, no changes vs. the previous day.

9 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 31130

Total recorded cases at 9243307
Recovered cases at 9052484 (around 14,000 recovered cases up from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 159,693 (up around 2000 vs the previous day).
Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 1.72%.

Photo 03
About the heat:
A man in his 90s died of heatstroke at home.

Photo 04
A man in his 30s working on a housing construction site got taken to hospital with suspected heatstroke and he is still in a coma.

Photo 05
If we look at the temperatures for the latter third of June (including the forecast for the next few days) in Tokyo, we could be looking at an average temperature for the period of 32.2C, which he says would be the number one temperature for the period in the last hundred years [and I think he only looked at 100 years’ worth of records, so very likely this is an all-time record for Tokyo for the period].

Photo 06
He graphed average temperatures for the period since 2011 vs. number of people taken to hospital in Tokyo with heatstroke in Tokyo. The previous high of 30.2C produced 387 hospitalizations, so we can comfortably expect to top that this year.

Photo 07
Finally, in a new feature on society and culture, they pointed out that last year saw over 10 million people identify themselves as runners (or joggers).

Photo 08
And that was the jumping off point for a feature on “running addiction” where dopamine addled running fiends can’t stop running, even when injured.
[I have a feeling this will appear in the Backstories section of NHK News in English later this week, so I am not going to go into it here.]