18 May 2022, Wednesday — Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 1): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers
Day 751 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 in this morning’s 7am bulletin headlines but during the Biz section, they mentioned the moves towards opening up to foreign tourists.
Couldn’t find the numbers on any of the bulletins so those are taken from the website.
I’ve added a couple of extra non-covid related bits of interest at the bottom of the thread too.
Photo 2a
[Taken from the NHK website]
36903 new cases confirmed
[vs. 42160 for the same day last week. 30481 the same day two weeks ago.]
47 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.
I can’t tell from the website whether there are any new daily case records.
Nowhere with five digits
Quadruple figures in 9 prefectures:
Okinawa [over 2000 again], Fukuoka, Hyogo, Osaka, Aichi, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Hokkaido
38 prefectures in triple figures
0 prefectures in double figures
Tokyo on 3663 [vs. 4451 same day last week]
Osaka on 3932 [vs. 4240 same day last week]
[Two weeks ago was 3357 and 3318 respectively.]
The number of positives at immigration testing was 102
Photo 02b
[Taken from the NHK website]
The total of current active serious cases stands at 127, down 7 from the previous day.
39 deaths announced yesterday, for a total of 30143
Total recorded cases at 8442581
Recovered cases at 8016117 (around 36,000 recovered cases from the previous day and topping 8 million)
Total active cases are at 396,321 (up around 1000 vs the previous day).
Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total is 4.69%
Photo 03
The biz roundup section mentioned that Japan was planning to bring in small tour groups of foreign tourists on an experimental basis this month [with a view to readmitting foreign tourists in stages from next month].
[Considering it is already May 18, they’ll have to hurry…]
Photo 04
The tours will be open to residents of four countries (US, Thailand, Singapore and Australia) who have had their 3 vaccine shots.
Photo 05
In 2019, over 30 million foreign tourists visited Japan so the impact on GDP is significant.
[Though there are those, for example many residents in Kyoto, who have been happy to have been less swamped in the past couple of years…]
Photo 06
There was quite a big piece on HPV vaccine this morning.
The govt. is going to restart actively promoting HPV vaccination for females of elementary grade 6 through high school grade 1, with the possibility that the vaccination will be free.
[I believe they said bookings for this will start from June 30.]
However for women who are between the ages of 17 and 25 this year, encouragement to be HPV vaccinated was suspended for 9 years and they never got the info.
Photo 07
On last night’s show, there was a thing on baby names.
Ren and Tsugumi continue their reign at number one.
But the number 2 for boys (ostensibly could be read as “Youshou”) has seen parents applying a variety of readings to it, including Haruto, Hinata, Yamoto, Hikaru.
Photo 08
And the number 2 for girls (ostensibly could be read as “Aoi”?) has seen parents applying a variety of readings to it, including Himari, Haruki, Hiyori.
[It seems that up till now, there hadn’t been any limits into what reading could be designated for a kanji name, but now the government is looking into setting some standards, so that you might not be able to have Pikachu as the reading of your child’s kanji name.]]