What is the point of bringing up a unique point in time where confining everyone in their houses reduced interaction with this particular bacteria? The article paints those measures as if they were a good thing and now things have regressed.
People washed and disinfected their hands a lot more often and thoroughly during the pandemic. At least here in Germany. They stopped shaking hands, washed them thoroughly (at least twenty seconds, using soap) and disinfected them when entering or leaving stores. Now they shake hands again and the disinfectant is gone. Who knows how everyone is washing their hands today. It’s not far fetched to suspect that this behavior might have helped.
I got a totally different vibe: Japan is notoriously xenophobic and maintained extremely strict regulations on visitors that were far more stringent than western countries.
So the framing here sounds like a Japanese perspective: "we didn't want you to come, and we started to let you back in, and look what happened to us" which is probably a popular sentiment there.
it is absurd to suggest those measures were not a good thing, and factually inaccurate to say that the article expresses or implies any opinion about them whatsoever. it doesn’t.
it’s an article about a rise in cases. it mentions when the cases started rising.
To address a sibling commenter first: no, I don’t think any mention of covid is a political statement, that’d be absurd. We all experienced the mayhem, fear, and uncertainty together, and most of us, though sadly not all of us, made it out alive. It itself is not political.
But it is often made to be. I find the articles opening sentence is phrased in a way as to be invoking a boogeyman, not least to which is because covid restrictions in japan were relaxed two years ago. The phrasing implies a strongly direct correlation, rather than a more nebulous one where all diseases would increase by the same reduction in measures. The overt entanglement in the opening sentence feels like baiting a response by disingenuous or superfluous association. The article would have stood stronger on its own legs, I feel.
It’s possible people wash their hands less since COVID restrictions were lifted, or some other knock-on effect.
> … as if they were a good thing and now things have regressed.
Less “flesh-eating bacteria” in the world is probably always a good thing, independent of anything else.