Vaccination in JP lags the US and UK. A survey found 75% of locals don't favor foreign visitors for the Olympics. They are fearful of SARS-COV-2 variants.
On the other hand, why not allow foreigners who can prove they are vaccinated with the vaccine that immunizes against variants and also get the locals vaccinated?
And, implicitly, if Japan isn't trusting vaccines, should other countries have similar concerns about free travel?
Lol, it's Japan. I bet on any given day you could find that 75% of locals don't favor foreign something. (To be fair, they are not unique in this)
https://reason.com/2021/03/08/contrary-to-what-the-cdcs-new-...
In fact, the CDC just updated it's own guidelines to reflect these same facts:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
If anything, these guidelines are conservative.
Continuing to wear a mask in public is about compliance, not safety per se: if exceptions were made for the vaccinated, people who just don't want to wear a mask would be hard to separate from those who are no longer at risk of catching or spreading the disease.
As someone who has had natural immunity (it sucked, made a full recovery) for most of the pandemic, this has been on my mind, since masking is purely cosmetic for me.
Every additional exception introduces costs and risks so it makes sense for a part of the population to signal compliance unnecessarily.
> During a follow-up period beginning seven days after the second dose, vaccinated subjects were 92 percent less likely to test positive for the coronavirus, 94 percent less likely to develop COVID-19 symptoms, and 92 percent less likely to suffer serious disease. In other words, the risk of infection at this stage was much smaller than it was in the unvaccinated group. Although that risk was not completely eliminated, the CDC notes that "preliminary data from Israel suggest that persons vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine who develop COVID-19 have a four-fold lower viral load than unvaccinated persons," which implies that they are less likely to transmit the virus even when they are infected.
This seems consistent with what I wrote earlier.
Further, from the NPR article:
> Vaccinated people can also visit, unmasked, with people from another household who are not yet vaccinated, as long as those people are at low risk of serious illness from the virus. However, the agency said, vaccinated people should continue to wear masks when they're in public, avoid crowds and take other precautions when gathering with unvaccinated people who are at high risk of serious illness from COVID-19.
Nothing is guaranteed in life. There is always risk.