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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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" 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.

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.

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.

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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