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Comment by cmehdy | Hacker News Reader

While things like masks and social distancing are more likely to be already in place in Japanese culture, there definitely seems to be a bit of a surprise regarding actual numbers vs. means put in place to prevent the spread.

The reports seem to reflect the opacity of communication of Japan's situation about the Covid-19. It's good that the author put out actionable suggestions at the end, but I'm wondering if the opacity is a result of internal issues or intended opacity. Makes me glad to see Canada's stats[1] being so clear in comparison.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/201...

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Some anecdata here:

My friends run a mid-sized hair salon, about 8 workstations, on the west side of Tokyo [edit: Kichijoji] and are still operating. They see no reason to close down, haven't been told to close down by anyone, and although their business is down, it's still brisk.

Meanwhile the shops are full of both people and stock (except for loo roll).

Some young people in Tokyo have been returning by shinkansen to their parents' homes in the countryside (which is obviously a dreadfully bad idea). I persuaded my friends not to do that, but they were thinking about it.

Tokyo was mostly closed this weekend. IIRC by government request. TV shows showed all of Ginza closed. I walked down to Shibuya on Saturday, had one errand to run, it was mostly empty. Every chain store I passed was closed with a notice in the window. All the stores on the 4th floor of Mark City were closed. The basement food stores were open but the number of people were ~10th normal.

I agree though that until recently things were pretty open. Maybe they were open again today. I walked by a coffee shop and people were in it. The local Target like store was busy but main street in front of it was dead compared to normal.

Their salon is in Kichijoji which is not really central, as in well west along the Chuo line. I updated the original comment above.

I'm interested if you know more about this absurd-sounding Aso/wagyu beef tokens story? It's not reported at all in the western media.

> I'm interested if you know more about this absurd-sounding Aso/wagyu beef tokens story? It's not reported at all in the western media.

This sounds strange enough for me to want to know more, and I tried looking it up, but only found weird porn when searching without quotes, and weird blockchain stuff from China when searching with quotes. Do you have any links I can run through a translator?

Basically, they claim to distribute a Wagyu beef discount coupon. Terrible idea because ... people would want to go out to buy one...

The strategy here is clearly fighting Covid-19 with 'Security through obscurity'.

I am extremely suspicious that Japan's numbers look good because they have not been testing enough.

Given that honesty in testing consistently precedes the eventual slowdown in deaths by several weeks, I strongly suspect that Japan is maliciously incompetent and a lot of dead Japanese will be the result.

" I strongly suspect that Japan is maliciously incompetent and a lot of dead Japanese will be the result."

When? Japan has had this coronavirus a lot longer than most places. If we expected the transmission rate to explode, we would have expected it to happen already, and we would be seeing the consequences.

Are you sure we aren't seeing consequences?

https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-explainers/2020/3/2... shows that I am hardly alone in my suspicion that the numbers look good because reality is not being tracked.

It looks Tokyo is starting to have an out break

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-tokyo-olymp...

The most interesting point in that article is that Japanese citizens and politicians are suspicious of the timing. All numbers looked good until the Olympics were called off. Then Japan started reporting climbing cases and talking about emergency.

I certainly hope that the politicians in Parliament who asked questions got satisfactory answers. I doubt that they did, but there should be time to ask those same questions later when there is a clearer picture.

I just hope it isn't as bad as I fear it will be.

> All numbers looked good until the Olympics were called off. Then Japan started reporting climbing cases and talking about emergency.

Typical causation versus correlation problem. Exponentially increasing pandemic outside Japan can also be the cause for everything: the olympics cancellation, the increasing govt concern and testing, and the sudden surge of cases within Japan from travelers.

No conspiracies needed.

First of all, lack of testing and government denials that there is a problem here been a hallmark of the response worldwide. It is hardly a conspiracy theory to say that it happened in Japan as well.

Secondly for a couple of weeks now I've been running across articles of the form, "Japan should have had a problem by now, why are they an exception?" Which is more likely? That they were an exception until now, or that the Olympics provided extra motivation to stonewall?

It is clearly not proof. But extra motivation to fail to try to detect their own problem combined with reason to doubt their version of reality (in the same way that happened over and over again elsewhere) makes my estimate of the conditional probability very high that their government was simply a bit more deliberately blind than elsewhere.

And, as with everywhere else, the cost will be dead citizens. Only the further you let the problem go and the older your population, the worse it is. Japan has the highest concentration of truly old in the world. And may have let it go longer than anywhere else. The result? The final body toll won't be pretty.

"What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame."

I feel like we're watching Chernobyl play out in real time here.

I think this is the point. You can hide potentially the sick but you can't hide deaths or overcrowding of hospitals, someone will notice.

Japan may be an exception to that general rule. Most places, sick people go to the hospitals and die there. In Japan, sick people stay home, die, and are often only discovered a long time later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi is the Wikipedia article on it. It is hard to get statistics on it, but in 2006 close to 5% of all funerals in Japan were old people who died at home that nobody knew about for some time afterwards.

When all is said and done, Japanese will be discovering bodies for years afterwards. Not just because there is a crisis, but because that is simply how a lot of deaths happen in Japan.

Japan's numbers are probably low because of limited testing. Still somewhat reasonable to compare against countries that also have limited testing.

Regarding the presentation of the data, I've seem enough poorly formatted presentations over the years to say that is unique to Japan.

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