01 June 2021 (Tuesday) – Coronavirus Digest from Japanese Morning TV News Part 1 (of 2): Headlines and (yesterday’s) numbers

[Part 02 will be about vax stuff.]

As I mentioned in the memory I shared yesterday: Today marks 400 straight days of posting covid reports daily. Many thanks to people for their messages of support over this period. Hopefully, a vaccination coupon will be dropping through all our letterboxes soon.

See photo captions for stories

Photo 01a

The Beyonce and Jay-Z of NHK news.

Photo 1b

Japan covid-related topics from NHK’s 7am news bulletin today.

• Concerns about an increase in people’s movements under the SofE extension
• Workplace vaccinations could be coming as early as mid to late June
• Special report: The unvaccinated may find themselves at a disadvantage
• Australian Olympic athletes [the women’s softball team] arriving in Japan for training camp

Photo 02

1793 cases confirmed yesterday

[vs. 2712 for the same day last week, and 3680 for the same day two weeks ago.]

[bear in mind that Tuesday a.m. figures are traditionally the lowest of the week, but still that’s a considerable drop overall]

43 out of 47 prefectures reported cases yesterday.

No new daily prefectural records set.

Tokyo was 260

[vs. 340 for the same day last week.

Keep an eye on this. That’s two days under 500. A week of under 500 will likely prompt talk of moving Tokyo out of SofE and into Manbo instead.]

Osaka at 98

[vs. 216 for the same day last week.]

Triple figures for:

Hokkaido at 279

Aichi at 145

Okinawa at 142

Kanagawa at 139

The number of positives at immigration testing was 7.

Photo 03

The total of current active serious cases stands at 1349, UP 2 on the previous day.

80 deaths confirmed yesterday. That brings us to 13073 in total.

[That triggers my 500-death benchmarking.

Topped 12500 on May 26 so it’s taken 6 days to add another 500

12000-12500 took 5 days.

11500-12000 took 4 days*

[*Hyogo announced a backlog of 129 deaths dating back from end of March to the middle of May during this period]

11000-11500 took 5 days.

10500-11000 took 7 days

10000-10500 took 8 days

9500-10000 took 11 days.

9000-9500 took 14 days.

8500-9000 took 14 days.

8000-8500 took 10 days

7500-8000 took 9 days.

7000-7500 took 6 days.

6500-7000 took 7 days

6000-6500 took 5 days.

In JAN 01 Figures (i.e. for 31 Dec 2020, i.e. for ALL of last year), the total deaths stood at 3505.

We have added 9500 deaths in the first 5 months of 2021.

Deaths the day before Suga became PM stood at 1460, so over 11500 deaths have been on Suga’s watch.]

Total recorded cases at 747457.

Recovered cases at 676536 (up around 4100 on the previous day).

[Jabs calculator]

Total active cases are at 57848 (down around 2400 on the previous day and dropping below 60000).

Percentage of active cases as a percentage of the grand total is 7.73% [dropping below 8%]

Photo 04

Okinawa’s 142 is their highest ever Monday figure

Photo 05

Here is the breakdown for the Kansai region.

187 new daily cases. That’s the lowest for the region since March 22.

Osaka is under 100 for the first time since March 22.

Hyogo is under 30 for the first time since March 22.

Kyoto is under 30 for the first time since March 29.

Photo 06

27 deaths confirmed for the region.

That brings the total for May to 859, the biggest one-month total they’ve had and twice as high as the previous one-month total in January.

Photo 07

Osaka’s serious bed case occupancy rate was 70.9% as of yesterday.

[Please see Simon Phillips’ post below for an inside look at the state of Osaka’s medical system:]

Simon Phillips:

(Disclaimer: this was my wife’s experience as she is Japanese and works as a nurse at a very large public hospital in Osaka. This is also just one hospital and represents what is happening their and on the operating theater and doesn’t represent the whole of Osaka and Japan. The comment is written out as a rant rather than an informative piece.)

Erina doesn’t talk much about the corona problem in her hospital, she usually whinges about colleagues and management so to hear her complain about convid was a shock for me.

First, her hospital has reached its limit in accepting high risk patients and has had to overflow into other ICU wards and even close down normal wings just for convid. They haven’t accepted normal outcome patients since the beginning of February, if you want to attend the hospital for other reasons then you have to find another. Her hospital is a city run hospital and not the standard privately owned ones that are scattered about which benefits her as she hasn’t had her bonuses cut due to cuts in profit.

The way the nurses take care of the corona patients appears to be on rota; one week you will be called to take care of a certain wing depending on the level of infection and if you were lucky you might miss the rota and just stay on ward you work on, sometimes going weeks without being asked to work on the convid wings.

As of the beginning of the pandemic Erina hasn’t really been involved in the outpatients of ICU wings, the only time she has been asked to deal with corona patients was when a patient needed an operation and they were infected. But since the end of February the situation has increased and now, she has been called to other parts of the hospital to help out with corona patients and ICU treatment.

Now for the complaining that she laid out to me this morning; there is no more room for corona patients as the hospital is full. She doesn’t know if the hospital is turning away corona patients but she does know that standard healthcare is not welcome.

She had to deal with an infected patient on her last shift who needed an operation and when everything was done and dealt with, she spent two hours cleaning everything thing in the operating theatre and once she was done her manager told her that the two hours was too long. Erina said she was pissed off and went and talked to another nurse and found out that that nurse took under an hour but rushed through the clean-up and didn’t even change her PPE outfit which is common place when sterilizing. The biggest shock was that the management were using this member of staff’s routine in setting a baseline, ignoring the rushed clean up and not even changing out of the used PPE.

There were more horror stories of cutting corners and staff lazing their way through sterilization and the biggest point is lack of education for everyone from the top brass all the way down to the contracted cleaning crew.

What does my head in is how the Japanese TV is showing the number of infections dropping (ignoring that test numbers are dropping along with them) and patting themselves on the back for doing a great good with our lip service sate of emergency. The overflowing hospitals and turning away of patients don’t tell me that we have the infection under control.

In the end it’s all about the Olympics as with each passing day the government and the IOC keep pushing it even though 90% of the Japanese population, nurses and doctors’ associations are against it but we must have the Olympics to show the world we have beaten the virus.

Photo 08

Osaka city is opening its own large-scale vaccination site at Intex on June 07, and the website for making appointments for it is open to Osaka city residents of 65 and over from today.

[Not making the regional news this morning, but yesterday saw the start of Kobe city large-scale vaccinations at the Noevir stadium. (By the way, they do have a shuttle bus service to go there.)

Also, the cancellation of the 2021 Kobe Marathon was announced yesterday, making it two years in a row that this won’t be held.]

https://www.city.kobe.lg.jp/a73576/kenko/health/infection/protection/largescale.html

https://www.kobe-np.co.jp/news/sougou/202105/0014373047.shtml

Photo 09

As of yesterday, the SDF-run large-scale vaccination sites in Tokyo started accepting people from Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba too [earlier than originally planned] and Osaka is accepting people from the whole prefecture.

Photo 10

This woman has come in from Funabashi city in Chiba.

Photo 11

“I had a 10am appointment so I left home at 7:30.”

Photo 12

As of yesterday, the Tokyo and Osaka centers have also ramped up to full capacity, 10,000 for Tokyo and 5000 for Osaka.

Photo 13

The SDF reports that for their first week, from the first day of vaccinations until May 30, they had vaccinated a total of 67316.

Photo 14

Appointments for the Osaka SDF-run center opened up yesterday for people [over 65s] in Hyogo and Kyoto, with all the slots for this month from June 07 already filled.

Photo 15

The SDF say that they are anticipating that a certain number of people won’t turn up for their vaccinations so they are booking slightly more reservations than their official capacity.

Photo 16

The SDF is also changing their booking system from a weekly system to one where if there is a cancellation, bookings can be made even the day before the vaccination day [i.e. you can keep checking back for cancellation slots].

Photo 17

The State of Emergency extension begins from today.

Here is Tokyo’s 2021 calendar.

They were SofE from Jan 08.

From March 22 to April 11, they were SofE-free, then Manbo, then back to SofE.

Photo 18

Government sources say that they want to suppress the spread of infection quickly in anticipation of holding the Olympics next month.

[Reading between the lines, I think this means that the extension of SofE will continue till June 20 regardless of whether Tokyo manages to fall under 7 days of 500 cases (moving from Stage 4 to Stage 3) this week or next week.]

Photo 19

There are also concerns as they are seeing a resurgence of people’s movements in particularly in downtown Tokyo and Osaka.

Photo 20

The government has also indicated that it would like to begin vaccinations at workplaces and universities from the middle or latter part of this month. [no details given as to what exactly this entails]

Photo 21

Australia’s Olympic softball team headed out for Japan last night.

They will be doing a training camp in the host town of Ota in Gunma from today until right before the Olympics begin. [Their first game is in Fukushima. I presume they will also be in Tokyo for the opening ceremony?]

Photo 22

This is the first time an overseas team has come to Japan for a training camp since last year’s postponement of the Olympics.

Photo 23

All team members have had their two vaccinations, they won’t be going out except between their accommodation and the baseball ground, and they will take PCR tests everyday.

Photo 24

Osaka city did a survey of municipal elementary and junior high schools who mainly gave up regular lessons between April 26 and May 23 and switched to a mix of online lessons at home and printed study materials at school.

Photo 25

250 of the 418 schools said they held online classes and morning meetings during the time allotted by the city.

Photo 26

Of these, around half said they had unstable connections or [people who] couldn’t connect.

Photo 27

If other family members were using the internet at the same time, the connection got worse.

Photo 28

Lower grade students who had not yet learned the alphabet found it difficult to enter their log in passwords.

Photo 29

Osaka city education officials said they would like to improve the system based on the feedback they have received.