The riddle of Japan's dramatic drop in Covid numbers
npr.org
npr.org
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
So if people have less comorbidities and that contributes to both less spread and less severe infections it should reduce contagion. Or I suppose contagion is still occurring but isn’t detected because the infections are subclinical and the host never even tests.
If you catch covid but don't feel it, then you'll go back to normal without ever testing and thus ever knowing you had it.
If this happens for many people in a country (because of whatever reason) then you could easily have 50-100x the recorded numbers but nobody would ever feel it.
India has a lower rate of diabetes than Japan does, and a lower rate than the global average [0]
India has a large population of diabetics, but that’s due to their massive population size overall.
CIA world factbook measure Indias obesity rate to be lower than japan’s, though the data is from 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...
Is it OP's position that an obesity rate of 3.9% is significantly lower than a rate of 4.3%?
OP seems to have overstated their claim.
Yes, in my opinion a 10% difference is significant. The source in no way contradicts that. If you believe 10% is not significant, that's just your opinion as well.
People often overlook that Japan has had fewer than 2 million infected people. If you don’t get infected, you don’t get sick
Add the vaccination rate to all that and it's not hard to see how the R number dropped to <1 (and stayed there). Though we may be rebounding slightly in the last few days, so we'll see whether it's the start of a new wave or not. Whether we get a significant year end wave like we did last year will tell the story.
The wisdom of this as a public investment in health seems so obvious that I keep wondering why there's been no similar progress discernible here in the States, followed up with tighter HVAC requirements in building codes.
How does that work? A single mutation that decreases transmissivity (anywhere between 0-100%) presumably loses out to the regular variant. So did any such mutation develop spontaneously in many viruses? Can't see how that could happen.
We basically took much precautions earlier in the pandemic but later on reverted to life as usual. Markets, restaurants, offices, et al are wide open and people are going about their lives pre-pandemic, however our Covid rates are relatively low; barely 3,000 deaths from a population of 200 million+ if we're to believe the data from our health agency [1].
More so, we're only about 2% vaccinated [2] (I'm included in this group), but with that quite dire rate, I don't really observe a gloomy pandemic around us. I honestly can't point to anyone in my social circles who died of Covid, but there are a few infections whom all recovered quickly.
I'm still trying to understand why, because my common sense expects that Covid should be dealing with us due to our very low vaccination rate. Are the numbers forged? Are we just ignoring the misery around us? I can't tell but I'm hoping for a scientific explanation. Perhaps, if there's an expert immunologist around here should please give me an opinion, I'm all ears and asking in good faith.
1- https://covid19.ncdc.gov.ng/
2 - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_W...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3
(I'm interested in this, as I had severe covid with no prior health problems, but do have these N genes).
I believe the reason(s) are still largely unknown. There are multiple plausible explanatory factors, but nothing be really validated. And especially structural explanations (local age distribution, underlying comobidities, population genetics) seem inadequate to account for the huge time variation in cases/deaths. To the point, nobody can confidently predict if Japan, India or South Africa won't have another huge wave 3 or 6 months from now.
> "Even though I keep having no COVID patients, I haven't seen anybody on the street in Japan not wearing masks," observers Oka. "Even though they think it may not be necessary, there is pressure for people to do the same as everyone else."
This is probably not sufficient, as the article points out South Korea has much the same culture. But it seems definitely necessary.
Perhaps occam's razor applies.
Which means what exactly within this context?
Like I see the argument for why all countries would want to make themselves look good. (It's weak, because if people start dying in ways they're not tracking they have bigger problems, but I can see the argument that the motivation exists.) And I can perhaps see the argument that the more autocratic a country is, the more likely they are to do so. But none of that explains the observation "Japan is reporting a low number of covid cases compared to other similar countries" - and especially not "Japan is reporting a sudden drop in covid cases compared to other similar countries." You need to multiply a lot more entities to get there.