This is an important factor that may indicate this "outlier" is more of a delay, rather than a reality of some exception.
As a resident, I'm quite concerned about the lack of testing.
Even with these explanation, I'm still perplexed as trains in Japan are always packed and it's impossible to stay 6-feet away from others when you're travelling in dense cities in Tokyo. You're also constantly touching poles/handles in the train or pushing elevator buttons.
I think people in Italy feel that the quarantine isn't working because it's not strong enough. And people around the world kind of expect Italians not to take it seriously. Actually, it doesn't work except to decrease the exponent on the growth of the epidemic. In China, with a much stronger lockdown, they had the same R0 as we have in Italy now ~1.25 until they started moving people who were symptomatic or had contact with positive COVID cases to hotels and, if serious, field hospitals and ICUs. We have to do the same or it will sweep through the entire population.
That's also because, in my view, those in power have no idea how to read the curves and the scale, and the fact that you have at least 10-14 days in lag before seeing any effect. Also, this is about growth, so the number of cases (and, unfortunately, deaths) will keep on increasing even with a perfect containment until it "burns out". Again, the powers that be, at least in their public statements, seem to have little to no understanding of this fact.
But they also prefer cherry picking those who don't follow the rules (or go with statements that can't be traced to the data itself).
What is needed most now is field hospitals, staff and protection equipment, because the system, again even assuming a perfect containment, will take at least a month to get relief from the pressure. But those, as opposed to quarantine measures, still go through bureaucracy (note for the non-Italian HN crowd: it's really hard to explain because it is something very peculiar of highly burocratized governments, and in some aspects, unique to my country).
Also this won't be able to go perfectly for more than a couple months at best, IMO. Let's not mention economy, for now, but isolation (despite the "reassuring" messages from the media) will start taking its toll sooner or later. We're at week 3 and for me (in Lombardia) I'm already starting to feel that. Not that I'm going to break quarantine, but if the period extends for too long, some may tempted to do so, with potentially bad effects.
The real reason for the low number of cases is the lack of tests. I’ve spoken today with multiple Japanese friends and other residents, all think the government is lying and hiding it to save the Olympics. We will see the truth in a month...
At some point it would become too big to ignore. But is Japan there yet? This is definitely a space to watch over the next 2-3 weeks.
I can see the virus spreading silently among the young and healthy. But Seattle and Italy have showed us that it’s very clear when the very old start catching it.
Doesn’t this suggest that Japan truly isn’t experiencing a wave of silent infections?
Obviously time will tell with all of this. But so far, time has told us that either a) the transmission rate is extremely low in Japan for some reason or b) no one is dying from the virus in the world's oldest country, for some even harder to explain reason.
The world needs to be looking hard at Japan to see what the hell is going on there.
I think it's because they've bucked the Test, Test, Test advice yet still had a relatively good outcome so far.
It feels wrong to so ignore Japan. If they are doing something right here, the world should try to find out.
when the number of symtomatics become very large and saturate the testing process, the reporting will no longer follow the real curve of cases over time, only the number of test that can be performed over time.
[i meant to reply here | moved from previous reply below]
I don't know for Japan, but here in Canada, on top of showing symptoms, we need to have taken an international flight, or be in contact with a known carrier. The number of people having taken a flight won't grow... that's for sure, and contact, well it's recursive at that point and depends on whether you were in contact with someone that has taken a flight, has shown symptoms, has taken the test instead of following the quarantine asked, and has been positive. So essentially in our case, the number of people meeting the criteria can only go down actually.
We would expect the number of people requiring hospitalization with symptoms to grow though. I don't know if that's enough to skip the criteria though, here in Quebec our number of death got lowered yesterday because the test came back negative...
It does makes sense though to keep theses criterias, because most case doesn't require hospitalization, and there's a very limited amount of test available. In Quebec it seems like we are now able to carry enough test for people with theses criterias, so with some luck, we will remove the contact criteria soon, and get a better picture of the propagation.
In South Korea 30% of the infected are in the 20-30 range, it's most probably the same everywhere but we just don't know it because they would most probably be asymptomatics.
* Those who can weather corona at home do not benefit from testing.
* Performing the test requires the same protective equipment as treating corona patients and there's already shortages on those worldwide.
* Performing the tests requires some of the same people, who could be actually treating corona patients.
As long as you test symptomatic cases, the death count should at least be reliable, right?
That a third the deaths of South Korea (who has very aggressively contained).
For instance, if there's a significant difference in testing regime and/or calibration of results.
There could plausibly be 10x more cases than reported.
But it's much harder to under-report deaths. And those are low.
If you're at home with what appears to be a relatively mild case of COVID, testing you doesn't tell us much right now[0]. Isolate yourself, even from your cohabitants, and scrub everything like the dickens when you feel better. You should be doing this anyway, even if it's "just" the flu.
Testing people that were around you, however, is critical for preventing the virus from spreading. This is especially true for people are asymptomatic or presymptomatic but nevertheless shed the virus.
[0] This might change in the future as we learn more about if and how long the immunity lasts; perhaps you could go back to work. Hopefully sereological testing will fill that gap soon.
Even South Kora required symptoms for free testing. Else it cost about $140 as I recall. That would certainly motivate me to wait a bit to watch symptoms. A fever should mean staying at home, no matter what the cause turns out to be.