China News Service, August 17. According to Kyodo News, the estimation results obtained by the University of Tokyo and other teams recently showed that from March 2020 to June this year, the number of suicides affected by the new crown epidemic in Japan increased to more than 8,000. .
According to a survey conducted by the University of Tokyo, the majority of suicides are women in their 20s, and there are also relatively more women under 19.
According to Japanese government statistics, the number of suicides in Japan has been decreasing by about 500 to 3,000 people year by year since 2010, but in 2020 it increased for the first time in 11 years.
There will be around 21,000 suicides in both 2020 and 2021, more than in 2018 and 2019.
In Japan, rising unemployment leads to an increase in suicides, and economic hardship is considered one of the important reasons.
The team first predicted the previous changes in the number of suicides and the unemployment rate, then estimated the number of suicides in the same period without the epidemic, and then compared it with the actual number, and calculated that the epidemic caused an increase of 8,088 suicides.
In terms of age group, 1,837 people aged 20-29 ranked first, accounting for nearly 30% of the suicides. The impact of the new crown epidemic is evident.
Among them, 1,092 were women and 745 were men.
There are also 377 people under the age of 19, accounting for about 20%.
For the first time in 2020, Japanese primary and secondary school students reached 499, and the number of suicides remains high.
The team believes that less connection to others leads to an increase in suicides due to loneliness, and that movement restrictions are also contributing factors.
"Compared with men, women with more informal employment are more likely to be affected by the economy, and young people are more likely to fall into loneliness due to restrictions on movement, etc."