Japan Logs 27.5 M. New COVID-19 Cases in 2022

Jiji Press

11:08 JST, January 1, 2023

Tokyo (Jiji Press)—Japan confirmed a total of 27,504,428 new COVID-19 cases in 2022, up 18.4-fold from the previous year, as highly infectious omicron variants raged.

New fatal cases totaled 39,158, up 2.6 times.

Japan reported its first novel coronavirus case in January 2020. That year, about 230,000 people were infected.

In 2021, 1.49 million people contracted the disease as the delta variant spread.

The first of the omicron variants began to spread early in 2022. In summer, the daily count of positive cases hit a record high of over 260,000 during the seventh wave of infections in summer.

Japan recorded 3,507 fatal cases in 2020 and 14,908 cases the next year.

In 2022, the daily count of fatalities shot up in November and hit a record high of over 400 on Tuesday.

On Saturday, Japan logged 106,412 new positive cases and 256 fatalities. The daily count of new infections fell some 71,000 from a week before.