This week Japan declared and end to its seven week state of emergency in the battle against against COVID-19.
and it triumphed by following its own playbook.
With a population of 126 million, Japan only recorded some 16, 651 infections and 858 deaths.
During a national press announcement this week, President Shinzo Abe underscored the success of his country’s operation, saying,
“The Japanese way of handling this epidemic has been superior …. The deaths total in Japan has been much smaller in comparison to the other G7 nations. Japan has brought the pandemic under control in only one and a half months. So I think we have shown the strength of the Japan model.”
With little in terms of the broad sweeping measured being employed in many other advanced countries, the Japanese managed to drive down their number of daily new cases to 0.5 per 100,000 people.
- No strict ‘Lockdown’ policy
- No quarantining of the healthy
- No enforcement social distancing, only voluntary measures
- No sweeping panic measures to empty hospital wards for an influx of COVID patients
- No mass death totals
- No mass testing
- No mass contact tracing
- No tracking apps
- No fines or arrests
Instead, health authorities focused on avoiding a combination of “The Three C’s”: closed spaces, crowded spaces and close contact setting. By avoiding these high risk situations, health officials believed they could better identify and manage ‘clusters’ of infections. This also meant hat certain activities and businesses were curtailed, like large mass gatherings, sporting events, large retail stores situated in shopping malls and on high streets, large gyms, concerts, karaoke bars and nightclubs.
Japan’s approach seems to do what governments like the US and UK are still at pains to come to grips with – the Japanese acknowledge the fundamentals of the epidemiology of respiratory viruses, namely that if one discounts that the virus will do what viruses normally do during a typical seasonal flu cycle, then what’s left really comes down to the management and medical skill and capacity of the country’s healthcare system.
Economic Reaction
Diamond Princess was a shot across the bow for Abe which was invariably followed by calls from media and regional prefectures to move swiftly in implementing emergency measures to contain the virus. However, while city mayors called for a comprehensive shutdown of businesses, it was Abe who then intervened warning local governments to exercise caution in shutting down the entire high street economy so as to avoid any unnecessary economic and societal shockwaves. It’s important to note that there are fundamental differences underlying motivations of regional governors and the national government when it came to adopting a hard or soft lockdown policy. In the case of Tokyo, the city’s major Yuriko Koike appeared to favor a harder lockdown policy as essential to avoiding a massive outbreak of infections in the city which would severely dent residents’ confidence in his ability to manage the crisis. Conversely, Abe’s government was concerned about the broader economic and social impacts of a comprehensive shutdown which favored preserving more features of day-to-day life including keeping barber shops, hair stylists and DIY stores open.
Advantages
While it’s tempting to try and compare similar countries’ results in the all too popular COVID death sweepstakes – just as many pundits and pro-Lockdown pundits have tried to do with Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbors in order to discredit the Swedish government as presiding over a ‘unmitigated disaster’ for eschewing groupthink on lockdown policies – clearly there is no uniform ‘physics of COVID’. Every country is different, and each has its own comparative advantages and disadvantages in how it’s able to managed and cope in a crisis. Any meaningful analysis along these lines will most certainly require both a multilevel systems analysis as well as a granular look at each of a country’s key dimensional components like political, bureaucratic, healthcare systems, culture and public health and well being in general.
On paper, Japan might have been concerned with its fate. Firstly, is the issue of its proximity to the initial outbreak in China’s Hubei province. One would expect that China’s near neighbors would potentially be the hardest hit by COVID-19, only this wasn’t the case at all. Quite the opposite in fact, and its success in this regard was also shared by fellow non-lockdown neighbors Taiwan and South Korea, both of which exited the crisis relatively unscathed in terms of fatalities. In theory, an island nation should have little problem shutting down its borders to outsiders, and Japan did just that (shut borders on which date?) when government acted quickly in implementing bans on certain international flights coming into the country.
One might assume that the Abe government’s softer and more voluntary approach to social distancing was well suited to Japan’s culture which features a more reserved social interactions in public. But this is only one facet of the story.
While Japan shares many of the same attributes as a country like the United Kingdom – a densely populated island nation with multiple major urban metropolises, it wasn’t hit with anything like the medical turmoil and political chaos suffered in lockdown Britain. Again, for a country of 126 million, Japan only recorded some 16, 651 infections and 858 deaths. Contrast that to the UK who have logged approximately 267,240 cases and recorded some 37,460 deaths. Granted, Japan has not rolled-out any mass testing efforts, therefore it will no have nearly the number of recorded infections as other countries, but the death count is a fair comparison of the relative success of any two country’s policies.
[GRAPH: deaths per million]
Nursing homes… low levels.
But again, one should risk the temptation to cherry pick a single variable upon which to hang any comparative analysis on. While an unusually low percentage of nursing homes residents in Japan is correlating with an unusually low level of COVID deaths, another island nation like Iceland has a very high level of nursing home residents but a low amount of COVID deaths. (show stats). Still, this doesn’t completely rule out Japan’s low care home population as a major advantage, but it’s more likely that additional truths will also emerge when investigating other areas.
One such area of interest is nexus between politics, medical management and bureaucracy.
Dr John Lee: “mislabeling of deaths (Spectator)
Italian Health Institute publicly acknowledged that of all the COVID deaths previously registered by healthcare workers, only 12% were actually died of COVID.
(Graph applying Italian model. Prospective)
One such area could also
“New Normal’ is Fuel by “Second Wave” Theory
Despite it’s resounding success in comparison its its G7 cohort, Japan has still begun to incorporate many of the “New Normal” directives being pushed heavily by government bodies in China, Europe and North America. Even though the country has avoided upending its economy and social contract like many of its allies have done, it’s still obliged to normalize many of its policies with other more pedantic countries. Certainly, this element of international compliance is perhaps a bigger issue for any advanced economy who remains a major actor in the globalized economy – that includes catering for the health and safety concerns and the needs of travelers and corporations, as well the cautious among its own society. In this way, such “New Normal” provisions become incorporated into wider pool of globalized governance.
It’s important to note that wherever you see the term New Normal, it is likely predicated on popular “Second Wave” theory, that is the idea or belief that the coronavirus can spring into action at any time if lockdown or social distancing measures are relaxed. This of course flies in the face of hundreds of years of epidemiological science which shows this is not the case and that respiratory virus are generally seasonal in nature and go dormant until winter, or become extinguished altogether once nature herd immunity is achieved (and vaccine advocates will interject here with their argument in favor of synthetic immunity). For whatever reasons, the realities epidemiological science are being routinely ignored by governments who seem intent on treating COVID-19 as a year-round clear and present danger. Japan is no exception in this regard, as evidenced by Abe’s statement calling for a New Normal regime going forward, stating:
“Even after the lifting of the state of emergency, we are going to have to live with the coronavirus around us …. If we lower our guard, the infection will spread rapidly. This is the most scary aspect of this virus. So we need to remain vigilant while at the same time reviving the economy.”
“Our aim is to construct a new kind of daily life,” said Abe during his recent address. “From now on we have to change our way of thinking.”
This is where thing go slightly oblong. When businesses like gyms and theatres do reopen, it will be incumbent on businesses, at least in the near to mid term, to continue avoiding “The Three C’s”, namely closed and crowed spaces. But some of the work-arounds for this border on the extreme and it’s debatable how sustainable some of the new restrictions are. They include the following:
- Masks or protective visors required at Karaoke bars, seating at two meters apart
- Low background noise at pachinko gaming halls in order to prevent patrons raising their voices too high
- Gyms should limit ‘high intensity’ exercises
- Gym limits classes to 6 students per instructor, treadmills speed limit of 10km per hr
- Talking in the sauna is banned
- Actors in theatres are “in principle” expected to wear masks at all times
- TV scenes featuring singing, close action and kissing to be kept to a minimum
Going forward
Abe has indicated a likely return to large sporting events later this year, and also announced that the 2020 Summer Olympics are to be postponed until the summer in 2021.
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