20200709 (Thursday) Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Main News

See photo captions for stories.

Photo 01
Once again, the flooding and landslides in the Kyushu area took up most of the news, and rightly so. (A couple of days ago, one of the photos on this thread was a bar graph of rainfall in the Kyushu area with red bars showing rainfall over 400mm? Well, they had to go to purple to show rainfall of around 700mm yesterday. Red just wasn’t cutting it anymore.) At one point over the last couple of days, nearly a million people had been instructed to evacuate their homes.

Today’s Japan Covid-related NHK morning news topics:
– Tokyo 75, Saitama 48 new cases
– Special report: How can teachers make up for lost lesson time?

There was one brief mention of coronavirus during the Kyushu segment.
As we mentioned before, casualties may be up because people were avoiding going to evacuation centers.
There was a brief anecdote today of a woman who went to an evacuation center, but finding it crowded she has gone back to her own home even though she doesn’t actually have electricity at the moment.
Another thing mentioned was that unlike previous disasters, there are very few volunteer groups setting up at evacuation centers and in town to provide meals for people.

The final special report is not Covid-related but well worth looking into so I’ll provide a link if it ever makes the English news. The government instituted an “e-portfolio” program so that students looking to enter university could show they were more than just exam machines. They gave the contract to a private company, but in order to access the system, the students have to make an ID with the private education company Benesse. So there were questions about data privacy and Benesse trying to monetize the system.

AP: Benesse bought and took Berlitz into their fold some years back. They also “own” the GTEC exam and a couple other exams that are government mandated for students to take.

EMD: The fever thing is bullshit. Just had a student out for 5 days with a high fever. Now that it is below the 37.5 threshold, she is back to school. Without a test, I might add. Coming into a school that hosts everything from kindergarten to high school. She should be tested, teachers should be tested. The government just seems to love keeping itself ignorant of reality. There are documented cases all around the world with people who had covid-19, but only had a fever for a couple of days. Or those who walk around looking healthy who are actually infected. Test people properly.

DR: Yeah, it’s not going to happen though. They don’t implicitly state it but part of the idea is herd immunity mixed with testing. They won’t test unless it’s pneumonia, mainly because they don’t have enough hospital space. They’d rather allow the risk of some spread in hopes it isn’t serious and treat just the serious cases. I don’t disagree, and I’m only parroting what I hear. If I could vote in Japan, I’d be more politically active and try to enact change but, alas, I can not vote here and nothing ever changes. Abe won’t come close to losing his job even though he should be on the hot seat.

EMD: And yet paper after paper from the scientific community says they don’t believe herd immunity is going to happen with this virus. Might as well kill as many people as we can, that is what the government is currently doing.

DR: I suppose not though at this point I really don’t trust any opinions. There is way too much information about the subject. All I do know is Japan has a very low death rate so we all must be doing something right (masks!)

EMD: Masks are right. Bloody Land of the Free…. It makes people think their “Rights” the rights of the individual, are more important than the rights of the whole. They are WRONG.

Photo 02
Ibaraki prefecture had an earthquake of magnitude 4.7 and a shake of 4 on the Japanese scale.
“Wide shows” were quick to pick up on the fact that 6-8 earthquakes of magnitude 4 and above have happened in the last 6 months or so.

Photo 03
207 new cases yesterday.
75 in Tokyo
48 in Saitama
23 in Kanagawa, 9 in Chiba

13 in Fukuoka

18 in Kansai:
10 in Osaka
3 in Kyogo
2 in Kyoto
2 in Nara
1 in Shiga

Another 3 in quarantine after coming back from overseas.

[I was thinking we should change the country map to a bar graph style similar to rainfall so we could more easily see the hotspots…]

SNC: 2 in Okinawa (plus 5 military)

Photo 04
Tokyo is back under 100 new cases.
Of their 75, 50 were people in their 20s and 30s.
34 were from unknown sources.

Photo 05
The three prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama account for 70% of the country’s cases.

Photo 06
Shinjuku ward’s cases are mostly centered around the Larkers in the Dark.

Photo 07
In order to support people’s living expenses, the ward has independently instituted a system of giving 100k to each person who tests positive.

SNC: Isn’t this encouraging people to try to get infected?
LP: They will start COVID parties! Duh!!!!!!

SY: I think it is more a case of encouraging people not to come to work…

Photo 08
The ward intends to inform infected persons of this system this month, take applications by mail, and then pay out the money next month at the earliest.

Photo 09
Meanwhile the government says that the medical system isn’t under pressure so they are not thinking about reimposing a State of Emergency.

Photo 10
And they will be going ahead with the easing of restrictions on large-scale events [of up to 5000 people] from tomorrow, after talking to the country’s prefectural governments about important considerations.

JWD: Wh-what?! Pull a Florida?

SY: Masks on, no cheering, chanting or singing…

JWD: You know, in any other country, I would find that laughable but in Japan, we know people will actually abide by the rules.

SY: Concerts are relatively subdued affairs from an audience point of view anyway. The lack of excitement often throws foreign bands. They happen really early, like 6:30 or 7pm without a support act, and basically nobody drinks. Only the gaijin are at the bar (and you can’t bring your drink back to your seat). But I wonder about baseball, whether they will having roving beer hawkers with the Ghostbuster back packs. You only need one super-spreader there…

JB: @Simon Yates, we obviously attend very different concerts, my friend.

COF: I play in a band here. It’s usually 3~5 bands a night. Most Japanese just wave their hands and the men do tend to drink a lot. Our gaijin fans drink more though. We didn’t play since March but our friends’ band played last week, they had the sheet on stage and 4 people came to see them, not so fun.

Photo 11
[General rules of events]
People who have fevers or other symptoms are asked to stay at home.
People are also asked to avoid going to facilities that are not taking thorough preventative measures.

Photo 12
For event participants, you are asked to:
Download and install the contact tracing app ahead of time.
Proactively cooperate with event organizer requests to provide contact details.

Photo 13

For event organizers and facility managers:

Take participant’ temperatures

Ask people who have a fever to go home

Put measures in place regarding refunding money for those cases, and make people aware of them.

[I initially thought they were instructing the events to definitely give people their money back, but reading it again, it looks like they just mean: make your refund policy clear ahead of time – and that could include telling people there will be no refunds…]