Number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises in Japan

japantimes.co.jp

58 pointsfspeech55 comments

I live in Japan, and the people here are definitely being cautious, but apart from the local stores being sold out of masks, not much has changed so far. (And here's hoping for the best!)

Likely the Japanese response is not cautious enough. The virus seems to spread fast. However, its lethalness is likely overrated.

As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases. For China outside of Hubei, the ratio is 0.55%.

Of course, these are raw figures, and the lower ratio outside of Hubei may be simply due to the cases being newer and that more of the current cases will ultimately be fatal.

https://www.globaltimes.cn//content/1177737.shtml

One of the things needed is a quick and inexpensive test for antibodies to COVID-19 virus in order to establish how many actual infections there are.

>As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases.

This is a _confirmed_ deaths to _confirmed_ cases. Unless everyone has been reliably tested, we'd expected the number of actual cases to be higher given it can present with mild-to-no symptoms and such cases are less likely to be tested/identified.

There are also likely to be a number of deaths of patients who were never tested and therefore classified as ordinary pneumonia or flu deaths, rather than COVID-19. So it's not obvious that the long term mortality rate would be less than the raw figures.

Another concern is that the ratio of recovered to dead stays distressingly low, although that may reflect a rather long course for the disease of around 3 weeks.

If we had historical data on pneumonia and flu deaths there, we could compare current rates to that, and if the current rate was significantly higher than usual then it'd be reasonable to count the excess as COVID-19 deaths. I don't know if that data exists though.

An NTD reporter had a similar idea, but focused on total deaths in the city of Wuhan rather than just flu-like deaths. A funeral home staff member said that deaths per day was 4-5 times higher than before this epidemic started, but that only 6% of those deaths were labelled as "confirmed cases" that would count toward the official numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYYV1B1lRKY

Assuming a similar rate of undercounting across other funeral homes in the city, that would put the real death count so far at about 14,000. This is despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to prevent the spread of this virus.

(NTD has an axe to grind on this issue, but they have a reputation for factual honesty. I trust NTD's numbers far more than those of the Chinese government. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ntd-tv-new-tang-dynasty/ )

> may be simply due to the cases being newer and that more of the current cases will ultimately be fatal

That's the big unknown. "A small percentage drops dead on contact" would be one extreme, the other and much worse would be "almost everybody enters a slow but steady decline towards death which can take months"

Even if you recover from pneumonia, it can take time off your life expectancy.

Pneumonia is linked to shorter lifespan: A discussion with Dr. Maurice Mufson

https://www.mdlinx.com/infectious-disease/article/883

Deaths lag infections by several weeks. Death rate will seem artificially low until infections plateau.

I can second that. While more people are wearing masks than usual and Chinese tourists have nearly disappeared, things seem otherwise unchanged. I'm sitting in a cafe a few steps from the Hachiko Crossing in Shibuya right now—half past eight on Saturday evening—and it's full of cheerful, chatting people. But I'm sure most people are concerned about how things might play out in the days and weeks ahead.

Edit: Sunday --> Saturday

It Saturday.

Thank you for the correction!

Im not noticing anything either, considering finding some way to ban corona virus from my feed but they keep changing the relevant terms to get trough.

Unrelated: You go to any meetups in tokyo?

If it’s possibly being spread in the community and can take 14 days for symptoms to emerge, shouldn’t it be quite alarming that people are still congregating in public like nothing is wrong?

Has there been any concrete evidence of asymptomatic spread? Also from start I know most Pele fall in the 5 days range for showing symptoms. I think you'll find out much sooner if there is community spread. In Singapore they've done an amazing job at contact tracking and nearly all the cases are in distinct related clusters.

I see your point. But we're exposed to many risks in this fragile, densely populated metropolis, including flu epidemics, traffic accidents, terrorism, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis, that we could avoid by staying home or living elsewhere. Once we have made the decision to keep living here, I guess many of us also decide to go on with our lives as best we can.

From my count there has been nearly a dozen large companies in Tokyo alone 'going remote' the past few weeks. Nearly 500k workers suddenly have the option to work from a satellite office or home.. Alcohol hand sanitizer at the entrance of nearly all events and people requested to wear masks. Think they are being fairly cautious. Definitely not a mask scale panic though! :)

Shouldn't it be "as SARS-Cov-2 spreads" or "as more people get COVID-19"?

I see a lot of headlines using COVID-19 as if it is the virus and not the disease caused by it. Probably just semantics, but something I noticed.

The disease spreads together with the virus, doesn’t it?

Edit: I mean that it is standard usage to talk about diseases like gastroenteritis, tuberculosis and malaria spreading. One does not need to use “spread” only for the virus/bacteria/parasite.

Naming a virus after a disease is rather more monstrous than naming a disease after a virus, but nonetheless the virus is exclusively responsible for the causing and the spreading of the disease. In this particular epidemic, the risk of asymptomatic transmission makes the distinction more salient than it usually is.

Do you have examples of diseases named after a virus? I cannot think if any. (Edit: I found Ebola virus disease, Maburg virus disease and Nipah virus disease.)

Also MERS.

Middle East respiratory syndrome is the disease. The virus is named after the disease: Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

Sorry not to catch this question. COVID-19, "Coronavirus disease 2019," is a disease named after a virus. The virus itself is now named "severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2," or SARS-CoV-2, and hence is a virus named after a disease.

The authorities have completely fucked up the naming. No news outlet can call it SARS-CoV-2 as it will create panic as SARS has a higher death rate. So you are left with the hypercorrect use of COVID-19 over the actually correct use of "coronavirus".

The speed and scope of the Chinese response baffles me and it'll be interesting but unpleasant seeing how this plays out in other countries.

The WHO situation reports had 258 confirmed cases in Hubei Province on the 21st of January [0]. Now 3 weeks later China is quarantined and new emergency hospitals have already built. The speed and organisation behind that response tells me that the fog of uncertainty still lies heavy and whatever the Chinese government estimates might be they are not being published in the WHO situation reports.

As other countries start managing outbreaks the picture of exactly how bad this is will be a clearer. In no small part because the monitoring infrastructure will be ready in advance of cases appearing.

[0] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Cause government gets so used to hide information, they thought they could have hidden this from their people and the world as well.

It looks like the rapid hospital building was basically a PR stunt - once they were "finished" they remained mostly empty despite the region struggling for hospital space, whilst distracting from the problems China was having setting up the makeshift hospitals in existing buildings that they've ended up relying on. This only works in a country like China with a tightly muzzled press because journalists would see through it elsewhere.

Yeah sure, they waste money on building these things and then not bother to put people in there for quarantine.

Great that these claims always come with no links to any halfway credible source.

Just like a few days ago this guy claiming in another thread that the hospitals weren't actually newly built but just some re-purposed resort facilities, with the construction videos being fake. Suuure.

Why Japan still refuses to test everyone (or at least all Japanese passengers) on that Diamond Princess cruise ship is just strange at best.

The tests have a true-positive rate of 40%. Could well be, that the tests bring more hassle than they are worth.

Testing somebody without symptoms is not accurate. Additionally, the current tests are very expensive and remove capacity for other individuals with symptoms.

According to this article (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/12/national/scienc...), Japan doesn’t currently have the capacity to test everyone.

What's the upside? Tests are effectively positive/unknown in absence of truly reliable data about incubation periods etc. You'd treat someone from a high risk group who is tested negative just the same as while untested and without symptoms.

Japan doesn’t have enough testing capacity. Last week, they could do only about 300 tests each day nationwide and expect to increase to 1,000 by next week. Actually, currently no country has capacity to test everyone on a typical cruise ship. Even China has switched to chest x-rays and classifying anyone showing pneumonia on X-ray to be infected.

That cruise ship has put lot of strain on Japanese resources from testing to treatment. Once a persons has been tested positive, preparing hospital to accept that patient is another can of worm.

> Actually, currently no country has capacity to test everyone on a typical cruise ship.

According to their official announcement last week [1], South Korean government is currently able to test 3,000 persons per day and will be able to test up to 10,000 per day by the end of February. Even after accounting for false positives this would be enough to test everyone on a cruise ship.

[1] http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/tcmBoardView.do?contSeq=352788 "그동안 진단검사 기관을 시도 보건환경연구원에서 민간의료기관으로 확대하였고(2.7), 검사가능 물량도 대폭 늘리고 있으나(1일 200명→3,000명), 2월 말까지는 생산업체, 민간검사기관 등을 확대하여 현재의 3배 수준인 하루 1만 건의 진단검사가 가능하도록 확충할 예정이다."

I don’t read Korean so cant comment on validity of claim of able to perform tests. It seems very unrealistic. I might be wrong but the translation seems to give impression of count of diagnostic test kit versus capacity to perform actual test per day after samples are collected.

Edit: see additional information in reply comment by @lifthrasiir

You have a good point, but the quoted text directly mentions the test capacity, not the amount of diagnostic kits. For non-Koreans the following is a rough translation (all errors are mine of course):

> 그동안 진단검사 기관을 시도 보건환경연구원에서 민간의료기관으로 확대하였고(2.7), 검사가능 물량도 대폭 늘리고 있으나(1일 200명→3,000명), 2월 말까지는 생산업체, 민간검사기관 등을 확대하여 현재의 3배 수준인 하루 1만 건의 진단검사가 가능하도록 확충할 예정이다.

> Meanwhile it was made possible to perform tests not only from local Health and Environment Research Institutes but also from private medical institutes as of February 7, and the diagnostic capacity has greatly increased from 200 to 3,000 per day, but we plan to increase it further to 10,000 tests per day by the end of February, through more diagnostic kit producers and more participating private medical institutes.

The capacity might seem unrealistic, but the linked website has a live counter for the number of diagnoses in progress ("검사진행") and that reads 558 as of today. And that is not a stale counter; some daily report [1] has a table that reads 2,736 candidates were tested (negative) from 2020-01-03 to 2020-02-11 09:00 AM, and 4,054 were tested to 2020-02-12 09:00 AM, yielding at least 1,300 actual tests completed that day, and the counter remains relatively stable (992 back then). Probably it is true that 3,000/day figure is theoretical, but 1,000/day is very real.

[1] http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/tcmBoardView.do?contSeq=352847

Thanks for clarification and additional info.

Autranslation https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto....

> In the meantime, we expanded the diagnostic testing agency from the Institutional Health and Environment Institute to the private medical institute (2.7), while the number of testable items has been increased (200 → 3,000 per day), but by the end of February, The company plans to increase the number of diagnostic tests to 10,000 times a day, three times the current level.

IIUC it says 3000 per day. (I'm not sure if it's the peak capacity or if they can sustain it for long periods.) Also, it looks like they are still working to raise it to 3000 and expect to reach it soon, not the current capacity.

Bye bye Olympics. They are practically cancelled.

Unpopular opinion: the long term benefits to Japan -- in particular -- of having a virus that mostly kills old people are substantial.

Economies are for the benefit of the people. The point of the economy is to enable long, comfortable and happy lives as best we can. The system is not perfect but we have none better.

Seeing any sort of win in an improvement in the metrics because of mass deaths is putting the cart before the horse. The point of a thriving economy is specifically to prevent that sort of thing.

> The point of the economy is to enable long, comfortable and happy lives as best we can

Comfortable and happy, yes, but I can assure you That nobody who is dead has any opinion on how long their life was

Even edgier opinion: The long term benefits to the entire planet of having a virus that kills most people worldwide are substantial.

The elites who can afford to live comfortably in quarantined bunkers for years will be the only ones left, and they'll remake the world in their image without having to worry about the riff raff.

Solitary corporate overlords with armies of AI drones controlled from a StarCraft-like console, to keep the slaves in line until they finish building their personal pyramid spaceships.

The Justar Journal[1] book series basically.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/169314-the-justar-journal

The elites are only elite due to the riff raff. They depend on each other. My take on this is that the uber-elites will move the goal post segregating the elites into a new set of upper and lower classes. The cycle of greed, hatred, and delusion will thus continue ad infinitum.

Afaik the elites already have an average lifespan higher by 10 or so years compared to normal people, am on mobile and so I’m too lazy to search for links but the information is easy enough to find.

There are more realistic threats to elderly people in Japan: poverty and loneliness. They are lethal and getting only worse.

Loneliness is a threat to any modern society, after it has conquered basic survival and comforts, for that is when the pointlessness of existence sets in.

Poverty and loneliness are terrible. Being dead is fine because nobody who is dead is unhappy about the fact that they’re dead.

A lot of old people in Japan are working their whole life. Farmers tend to be quite old in particular.

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