Tokyo: Japan reported a total of 20,000,343 Covid-19 cases after new infections than doubled in less than two months from that logged on July 14, statistics showed on Saturday.
The country registered 99,491 new Covidcases on Friday. A total of 211 people were reported dead, bringing the total death toll to 42,363, according to data from the country’s public broadcaster NHK.
Japan has seen its seventh wave of the pandemic since July, and the number of new confirmed cases and deaths in a single day remains at a high level, reports Xinhua news agency.
The rapid rise in the number of deaths has made it difficult to cremate the dead in some parts of Japan, local media reported.
In Japan, the number of new infections in the latest week was 69 per cent higher than the previous week, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said in a report earlier this week.
Most of the country’s new coronavirus deaths in July and August were among people over 70 years old.
People aged 70 and above accounted for about 91 per cent of the virus deaths between June 29 and August 30, Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported, citing data from the Ministry.
Japan’s Asahi Shimbun said that the average life expectancy of Japanese men and women was shortened by 0.1 years and 0.07 years in 2021 due to the pandemic.
This was the first time in 10 years that the average life expectancy of Japanese people has been shortened since the March 11 earthquake in 2011.
The World Health Organization said that in the week from August 29 to September 4, the number of new cases in Japan surpassed 1,160,000, the highest number in the world for the seventh consecutive week.
During the same period, Japan’s death toll from the coronavirus reached 2,059, ranking second in the world after the US.
–IANS
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