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

Day 795 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 in the a.m. headlines, but covid did get quite a bit of focus in last night’s bulletin and that will be covered here.
For the morning: It’s hot, hot, hot. Save electricity. A two-year-old left alone at home died of heatstroke. And today is “AED Day.” More on those stories later.

Photo 2a
[Taken from yesterday’s 9pm bulletin]
23447 new cases confirmed

[so this is solidly up vs. both 16676 for the same day last week, 15515 the same day two weeks ago.]

47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.
A new daily case record in Shimane at 374.

Nowhere with five digits
Quadruple figures in 7 prefectures:
Saitama rejoining the party with Okinawa, Fukuoka, Osaka, Aichi, Kanagawa and Tokyo
32 prefectures in triple figures
8 prefectures in double figures
Nowhere in single figures

Tokyo on 3621 [vs. 2413 same day last week, quite a bit up]
Osaka on 2193 [vs. 1248 same day last week; Osaka up too]

The number of positives at immigration testing was a notable 27
[Border testing was relaxed even as the number of people being allowed into the country has doubled from June 01.]

Photo 02b
[Taken from yesterday’s 9pm bulletin]
The total of current active serious cases stands at 52, up 2 vs. the previous day.

13 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 31294

Total recorded cases at 9333179
Recovered cases at 9123671 (around 16,000 recovered cases up from the previous day)

Total active cases are at 178,214 (up around 7000 vs the previous day).
Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total of cases is 1.91%.

Photo 03
Tokyo’s 3261 is 1208 cases up on the same day last week and the 13th straight day of being higher vs. same dame of the previous week.

Photo 04
The Tokyo Monitoring committee has raised Tokyo’s alert level from Level 2 to Level 3 (“infections are spreading”)
[They only lowered it from Level 03 to Level 02 literally two weeks ago on June 16.]

Photo 05
Meanwhile the national average week-on-week increase rate for infections is 1.17, so things are going up again, driven by case rises in major cities.

Photo 06
Tokyo and surrounding areas, and Osaka are leading the way.

Photo 07
[Two reasons were given by the expert guy on this:
1. People staying indoors with the windows closed due to the heat
2. Immunity wearing off from third vaccinations.]
However, the government isn’t currently planning to 4th jab the general population, with shots being reserved for people deemed at higher risk: the over 60s, people with pre-existing conditions, medical workers
[Expert guy encourages old people to get their 4th shots promptly.]

[No mention of the BA.4 and BA.5 strains, though the article about Tokyo’s alert level says: “The highly contagious BA.5 strain of Omicron variant is replacing the BA.2 subvariant in the capital as suspected cases of BA.5 account for about 25 percent of new infections.”]

Photo 08
Schools are having a tough time of it, as they need to take covid measures, heatstroke measures and save electricity all at the same time.
[I didn’t keep the additional photos here, but they are doing usual stuff like getting the kids to drink water often. If it is deemed dangerously hot outside playtime is cancelled. Students are told they don’t need to wear masks to come to school and go home.
The classroom does have an air conditioner, BUT the windows are also cracked open for ventilation, so the air conditioning is not great, and neither is the electricity consumption.]

Photo 09
Temperatures are forecast to reach 40C in Nagoya, 37 in downtown Tokyo and 36 in downtown Osaka today.

Photo 10
Tokyo took 226 people to hospital yesterday with suspected heatstroke.
That’s 3 days running for this total to exceed 200.
[And that’s pretty unheard of for June.]

Photo 11
TW: Child neglect and death
A 2-year-old girl died in public housing in Tondabayashi, Osaka.

Photo 12

They arrested the grandmother (46) and the man she lives with (50) who are suspected of leaving her along in the house from 5am.

Photo 13

The child appears to have been dehydrated and died of heatstroke.

She also had not been fed for over half a day.

Photo 14

It seems she had been unable to get out of her playpen.

And the adults had not left her any food or drink.

Photo 15

It seems that the couple had gone out to USJ, leaving the air conditioner and fan on.

Photo 16

In addition to extreme heat and an electricity shortage, dams are short of water (after an extremely short and dry rainy season) and some areas are already implementing water supply restrictions.

Photo 17

This dam in Kochi is at 34.35 of capacity vs. 87.5% for a typical year, and is expected to fall below 30%.

[What you can see in the picture is the roof of a building that was submerged during dam construction.]

Photo 18

May’s domestic hotel usage figures were up 82.3% vs. the same time last year [with Golden Week this year being relatively restriction free].

Photo 19

Finally, just FYI today is designated as AED Day (the life-saving defibrillator)

[But they did a story on how one was needed by someone in a village but the AED was in a school which was locked at night, and the woman was unable to break the glass entrance door of the school with a hammer to get it.]

Photo 20

In fact, of the 7500 AEDs that are stored at public facilities, only 15.3% (mostly those at hospitals) are available 24 hours a day. 84.7% of AEDs are in places where there are times when they cannot be accessed.