Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

“Japan never imposed the sweeping lockdowns seen in many other parts of the world, largely relying on mask-wearing, hand-washing and avoidance of indoor crowding to keep the virus relatively under control.“

It’s really hard to describe how hard the Japanese Government has bungled the coronavirus response. It’s actually quite perplexing.

They really know how to keep the population guessing, it’s hard to get tested, the numbers all are dodgy and conveniently changing. There’s a three day lag in the data. It’s seriously mind blowing my bad.

Peope don’t feel comfortable because no one knows what’s really going on in Tokyo and to add to all the confusion, there’s a domestic travel campaign ongoing nation wide which encourages travel...insane.

View on HN

> It’s really hard to describe how hard the Japanese Government has bungled the coronavirus response.

If that truly were the case, it would show up clearly in excess mortality. Yet AFAIK it does not, which would be evidence for japan as a whole not having bundled its covid response, at least nowhere near as much as europe or the US.

Well, Japan's response was of course not perfect, but their results are really not much worse than South Korea's, widely regarded as the best-handled on the planet. They have, for example, much better results than any nation in Europe.

Now, this may not be due to Japan's government; more plausibly, there is a higher level of pre-existing resistance to the virus, since all the nations of east Asia (including Australia and New Zealand) are doing better than all the nations of western Europe. But it doesn't point towards an especially bungled response.

Well look at the rate of suicides though, the low death number have come at a high cost.

The pandemic response isn't just about case numbers, there is almost zero social welfare here, the economic is getting crunched, zero help for people with mental illness, elderly people are locked inside homes and can't go out, businesses are closing down constantly.

There is also a major shame culture here around being infected, if you're infected, you can be bullied to the point where people have had to move homes. People choose not to get tested for this reason. I don't think if people do die here, they actually are tested unless the family requests it, most don't because of the shame of it.

The only difference between Japan and most other countries is that people voluntarily wear masks here for some inexplicable reason, thank god, because without that, it would be ultra ugly.

Suicide rate hasn't meaningfully risen in Japan. If anything, they had a slight fall during the early days of the pandemic.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6...

> Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic.

Not to justify the low bar most of the West has tossed into the ocean, but Japan’s case rate has been orders of magnitude better than in the US or Europe. I would hardly call that bungled.

Japan's deaths per 1M is 17, whereas the US is at 836. Doesn't seem that bad to me.

> the numbers all are dodgy

> There’s a three day lag in the data

Do you truly need deaths as they happen by the minute?

The three day lag can be a buffer to have some time to think and decide what to actually report to the public.

Sure, and it can also be because the death certificates and medical records need to be compiled and aggregated, and many parts of that process can be subject to manual inspection.

Many people have cautioned against using mortality figures in the US as a measure of Covid spread, because these figures have a lag measured in weeks before they're considered accurate. Imagine the doctoring being done on those numbers!

Sounds like they're doing all the things that have a hope of working without voluntarily dismantling their economy.

We should envy them, not drag them down to our level.

>largely relying on mask-wearing, hand-washing and avoidance of indoor crowding to keep the virus relatively under control.

A correct response based on evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com