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Comment by needle0 | Hacker News Reader

Not anymore. Tokyo is already [edit: entered the hockey-stick part of] an exponential trajectory as of around 5 days ago.

https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en

Every press conference ending with Koike (Tokyo governor) or Abe (PM) babbling along with no material countermeasures being announced has been making me feel all the more dreadful. They needed to have already shut down everything long ago. We will be joining the world's other major outbreak cities in a week or two.

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The interesting thing is that like many people, they guessed that a lot of people would be contaminated during the 3-day weekend a week ago (great weather, cherry blossoms, and last carefree moments for people who will start their first job on April 1st). It's not innocent that Abe called for postponing the Olympics just before that weekend. Koike could have asked the parks and popular venues (department stores) to be closed a week ago, but instead only asked people to refrain from going. What was poised to happen happened, and the number of infected people exploded half a week later.

We haven't even seen the numbers from last weekend.

It takes on average 5 days for infected people to show symptoms, and they only test once you have fever for 3-4 days (I can verify this first-hand), then 1-2 days for the test results to come back. That 9-11 days average.

We will see a spike later this week based on last weekends warm weather and hanami.

I am currently in Japan and I can tell you it's like nothing happened. Today is especially a nice sunny day and the park I'm at is crowded with people enjoying their annual Hanami picnics. I am being told that since people are wearing masks then it should be OK. Although it looks like the majority aren't wearing them, probably because they are impossible to buy now.

We will find out the results after 2 weeks I guess.

I’m also in Japan. I’m shocked at how complacent people have been. It’s like city after city worldwide, people know what’s coming down the tracks but think it doesn’t apply to them. If we dodge this bullet it will be an absolute miracle.

That's more cases for sure over the last few days, but it's not exponential growth (yet). Sure, it's likely going to grow like that, but the recent data isn't evidence for it.

All countries started on an exponential trajectory.

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