25 June 2022

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

Day 789 of doing these daily posts continuously.

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01
Japan covid-related topics in NHK’s 7am news bulletin today:
Concerns about covid and influenza flaring up at the same time

Photo 2a
15815 new cases confirmed
[so this is solidly up vs. both 14709 for the same day last week, 15600 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
31 prefectures in triple figures
13 prefectures in double figures
Nowhere in single figures

Tokyo on 2181 [vs.1596 same day last week, quite a bit up (the TV said that’s 7 straight days of being up on the same day previous week).
Osaka on 1365 [vs. 1125 same day last week; Osaka up too]

The number of positives at immigration testing was a substantial 19
[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, down 2 vs. the previous day.

15 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 31121

Total recorded cases at 9226717
Recovered cases at 9038011 (around 15,000 recovered cases up from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 157,585 (up around 1000 vs the previous day).
Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 1.70%.

Photo 03
So despite it being summer, influenza seems to be starting to go around.
14 out of 45 third graders at this school had the flu…

Photo 04
…which led to a two-day closure of classes for that grade up until June 22.
This is the first closure of a public school in the city (of Tachikawa) since March 2020.

Photo 05
This woman is fretting as her daughter is covid vaxxed but flu jabs don’t really start till October.

Photo 06
As both she and her husband work, this woman is concerned about the impact it would have on their jobs if their child’s day care had to close for a flu outbreak.

Photo 07
At Thursday’s Tokyo Monitoring meeting, the experts pointed out that we are seeing a flu outbreak in Australia in the southern hemisphere.

Photo 08
Given Australia’s example, the panel thinks a flu epidemic is possible in Japan too [later in the year].

Photo 09
The trend in Australia often serves as a forecast of what may happen in Japan once the weather turns cooler.

Photo 10
With most covid restrictions lifted in Australia, the country has seen 147000 flu infections, over 400 times the rate of last year.

Photo 11
Aussie doc society vice chair: “With the covid restrictions of the last two years, there was almost no influenza [in Australia] over the last two years.”

Photo 12

“Around 3000 patients are currently receiving treatment for covid, so we would very much like to avoid a dual epidemic.”

Photo 13

In Japan, while covid infections were trending down in the five weeks following Golden Week, the numbers this week are basically flat, with 23 prefectures [out of 47, so basically half] actually seeing an increase in cases vs. the previous week.