My ex is Japanese, and she’s there with my kid, so I am getting reports on the ground. There are only about 1,000 cases, excluding cruise ships, so far:
But the things we are self-flagelleting for not having done sooner they don’t seem to be doing either. People are riding public transportation. Restaurants are open. Most schools are closed, by my kid’s (private) school is planning to reopen in like a week.
Don’t forget that Japan has one of the world’s oldest populations!
So Japan seems to be in “We got this” mode, while here our economy is melting down and we are anticipating a monumental amount of deaths.
Something doesn’t seem to match up with all that. Any ideas?
Not nonchalant. Events are being cancelled, store hours are reduced, companies are teleworking or shifting working hours, people are cancelling trips and reservations for both hotels and restaurants. Government and transit authorities are asking for cooperation to keep daily travel to bare minimum but there aren’t any ghost towns yet.
One thing I’ve noticed is that stores and restaurants during the week are dead. People who have to show up at work do so and go straight home afterwards. But during the weekend, after being cooped up for a week, go out eating, drinking, shopping to relieve some of that stress. And now with the weather warming up and just around the corner from flower viewing season, more people are outside enjoying the weather. This does not bode well…
Interestingly, Japan is having the same problem as the USA in terms of low number of testing. However it’s not for lack of testing capability. There’s political and medical (research) reasons for that which I won’t get into now, but people who want to be tested are being turned away unless a doctor or health official deems it necessary. There’s definitely more infected people out there and it’s probably a matter of time until they show up.
On the other hand, their hospitals haven’t been overloaded with cases…
Routine vaccination of the elderly against one form of pneumonia may be a factor. It may be having a protective effect against the coronavirus as well.
Or maybe they are about to explode, like every where else. I mean, you saw some of the notes in that article?
I think Japan is implementing the plan Trump would prefer: keep everything normal and just ride out the death toll. Maybe it’ll solve some of their “too many old people” problem.
Not in that article but I also would suspect that there’s a certain level of antipathy to the elderly among the people - and even to their own peers - so they’re probably pretty ambivalent to whether or not 9% more older folks die this year than a normal year, or not.
The problem is you can’t just quietly “ride out the death toll,” which is why I’m so baffled by what the Lt Governor said on Tucker Carlson yesterday. He said, “If I get sick, I’ll go and try to get better, but if I don’t, I don’t.” Well guess what, if everyone who gets sick goes and tries to get better, the hospital system collapses. If that happens, you won’t be able to “go and try to get better.” It’s messy and highly visible to have old people dying on the sidewalks outside hospitals.
I’m not there so I can’t comment with great degree of authority but I frequently watch news in Japanese on the ANN YouTube channel and Japan seems to have taken it seriously from the start.
Japan could be putting their thumb on the numbers a little but if they were having a full-on Italy or Wuhan-like crisis, we’d surely know about it. You can’t hide that kind of carnage. Keep in mind Japan was one of the first countries with multiple exposures.
Japan, like other Asian countries, has kept SARS in its consciousness. They got testing started right away, and unlike the US it didn’t take them weeks just to produce and distribute test kits and it doesn’t take days to get results once tested.
And unlike the Italians, Spanish, British, and Americans, the Japanese don’t have a “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want” mentality when authorities tell them to self-isolate. There’s a healthy degree of civic peer pressure.
You’re saying Japan wouldn’t be able to conceal a larger number of deaths. But you seem to feel that the Japanese people are somehow self-isolating without there being any public signs of it. How can that possibly be true?
The OP says Japanese people are riding public transportation, eating in restaurants, and going to classes. They are not self-isolating. That means the disease is spreading throughout Japan. And pretty soon the people who have been exposed to Covid-19 will become sick.
For the record, as I said, I’m not there either. But what I’ve viewed on television indicates that they took it pretty seriously in the early stages and that they asked for the public’s cooperation in isolating before it reached the crisis stage.
Italy shut down one section of the country after it reached the crisis stage. Worse, those who were in the parts of the country that were about to shut down, left and traveled to the rest of the country, taking their viruses with them.
It’s not just shutting down that matters. It’s the prevailing attitude of the people, both within the population generally and also people calling the shots. This isn’t to say that Japan’s curve couldn’t eventually shoot up at some point. In fact I suspect a number of countries, including China and the US, will experience a second wave of infection as a result of prematurely ending the states of emergency.
That is the opposite of every article linked in this thread so far. They were testing a small fraction of the people that S. Korea has and even people who’ve had testing recommended by a doctor have been denied.
They can hide this until it’s too late and that seems to be what they’re doing.
