Japan has conducted only 100,000 tests, despite having 125 million people & domestic production of test kits.
New Zealand has conducted 70,000 tests in a nation of 5 million - with limits to how many tests could be run for the first 2 months due to test kit availability.
Japan's response to the coronavirus is a model of what denial, suppressed testing & 'business as usual' looks like. It does't work.
They've been suppressing their numbers with incredibly narrow testing criteria, incl:
- you need a fever of 37.5 degrees or more for over 4 days
- AND pneumonia lesions visible in the lungs via chest X-ray examination
- AND SpO2 of 93% or less
SpO2 is the oxygen saturation of arterial blood. In short you can't get tested unless you feel like you're about to die. If you die before you're tested they don't test you.
These criteria have heavily suppressed Japan's reported figures, likely to retain their business & Olympics bid as best they could, possibly for other political reasons we could speculate about.
It was obvious months ago that Japan's response would fail, just as their handling of the Diamond Princess failed & ended up killing a dozen people unnecessarily.
Comments
(Old Spike)
actually not true, and yes i have confirmed it with japanese doctors. the test criteria is you have to have had a temperature over 37.5 degrees and you have to have been to an area where another known infected person was. the pnuemonia and spo2 criteria are for inpatient hospital admission, not testing criteria.
where did you get the idea denial was going on? and where did you get the idea that "business as usual" was going on? that's so off-base the opposite is true. is this some more "whatabout" to try to make china feel better? or you worried that someone in the party might have eyes on your position?
(Old Spike)
because there was no health emergency declared until about a week ago, they closed schools for a while & then re-opened them, until a week ago shops didn't shut, it was just business as usual with people wearing masks & not going out so much. Footage of people all out in parks checking out cherry blossoms, shopping going to restaurants etc. Even after the Health Emergency was declared restaurants etc have remained open in Osaka. I haven't seen anything from Tokyo for the past week.
Also the numbers don't lie. 100k tests in 3 months in a nation of 125 million. Several different reports of the testing being way underutilised - most of the time there's been a capacity of 7,000 tets per day but only a fraction of that was being used. South Korea has done over 5X more tests with less than half Japan's population.
It's only been this past week that things have started to get on track & that's because there's just no more capacity at the hospitals. Abe was talking about using the Olympic Village as temprorary hospitals / isolation facilities. Still the announced 20,000 test/day capacity will only amount to less than 10k/day unless things change. S Korea's been testing over 20k per day for months.
Look at the daily new cases for S Korea v Japan
Japanese experts have been saying they're only seeing the tip of the iceberg due to lack of testing.
Why are you denying this, the numbers are published online. 100k / 125 million. It's only slightly higher than NZ's 70k .... and we have just 5 million people & struggled to import test kits for at least 6 weeks, our capacity was way less than what we wanted & we had far less cases.
Since you're there, tell me what are they doing in the way of tracing?
(Old Spike)
because there wasn't an emergency until a week ago. schools have been closed and are still closed, your information is just plain wrong there. gatherings of more than 100 people have been banned for ages, all public events have been cancelled, all public places (museums etc) are closed. kids have to take their temperature every morning and report to their school if they have a fever over 37.5, and anyone with a fever over that has to stay home as do their family. restaurants are still mostly open (some have closed) but those that are open have hardly anybody at them, while drive thru lines are massive. mcdonald's has had to start a online ordering method to cope with the lines. the cherry blossom viewing has been massively reduced. the large public parks where most peoplego are closed, and local parks have picnickers spread here and there rather than the entire ground being blanketed as in most years.
japan hasn't been doing as much testing because their approach has been to try to reduce the need for testing, with measures in place since months ago to reduce movement and thus spread and thus the need to do a lot of testing. there have been spots here and there were they've been breakouts, and they used more tests than usual in those areas to make sure the people who need to stay home know, and so there's no need to blanket test.
"japanese experts" what experts?
"why are you denying this" denying what? i'm not denying there's been less testing. the approach is different and so the necessary steps are also different. they're not going for a "zero cases" approach but a "keep the number of infections low" approach. you don't need to test a whole bunch of people who haven't been anywhere, and even among those everybody's doing their own monitoring too. even i have to take my temperature and report it daily, and companies that have had a confirmed case are either shut down or if they're essential they're having their temperature taken hourly.
(Old Spike)
Your 1st paragraph is mostly describing what's happening now, since a week ago. That lines up with what I'm saying.
The WHO has been telling countries "test, test, test" for a long time. Japan's deliberate lack of testing, or "alternative approach" as you put it has failed. I suspect it was initially about business, particularly the massive investment that's gone into Tokyo 2020 but that's just speculating.
It does seem like you're in denial. Japan chose the wrong path & it's backfired. Now there's a big mess when it could have been kept at a low level considering what Japan has with health resources, culture etc.
(Old Spike)
"has failed"? as evidenced by what?
"chose the wrong path" again, as evidenced by what? what big mess?
(Old Spike)
(Old Spike)
notice how old those articles are and their contents all talk about nothing more than "concern". i thought they were trying to do a coverup back then too and a few doctors i spoke to thought the same thing, but because numbers are being tracked by local institutions (including just number of people presenting with fever above 37.5, tested or not) it can't be that the national government is trying to hide numbers. they are definitely saving test kits for when they're absolutely needed, but that's nothing new they've always been like that here. the flu medicine for example can't be prescribed without a test, a doctor strongly suspecting flu isn't enough because they want to make sure there's always enough flu medication around and so it's only used on confirmed cases.
(Old Spike)
I'm not charging them with a cover-up, it's more a case of pretending it wasn't a problem & what looks a lot like deliberately keeping the numbers low by not testing anywhere near enough.
Funny how so much scrutiny has gone into probing China's numbers but nobody bothers talking about hapan's obvious policy of suppressing testing.
(Old Spike)
like i said they're not suppressing testing. people were mostly staying home since ages ago, thus the low numbers.
(Old Spike)
I think they're supppressing testing compared to what would be a responsible approach, which would be more like South Korea. Japan should have a million tests completed by now i they seriously wanted to trace & destroy the thing but there's only 10% of that.
You can see by the fact that Japan's numbers are not going down yet that the laxed approach they'e taken re: testing has failed. It goes against the WHO's advice, they've been shouting about testing as much as possible since early days.
The Osaka governer declared it over in March. Now the nurses there wear garbage bags for PPE & he's on Twitter asking people to donate raincoats for health workers.
Whether they've been in denial or suppressed testing is subjective I guess.
(Old Spike)
(Old Spike)
yeah costco was having problems with people buying up cheap stuff. they limited sales to one box per customer months ago. weirdly it was happening with everything but toilet paper. hand sanitizer and masks sells out everywhere every morning but quietly and orderly, nothing like this video. there was a story that these people were actually chinese immigrants buying them up to send back to china or sell here at markup, but it was no doubt just right-wing propaganda.
(Old Spike)
lol, no. You can easily get PPE in China now.
Japan had a run on toilet paper early on when they thought it was imported from China. Japan & HK were the ones who started that craze I think. Not 100% on that, it's just where I noticed it first. HK went nuts over it.
(Old Spike)
April 7 - NYTimes
April 7 - NYTimes
(Old Spike)
yeah that's about 20% of usual, just as i said. this is usual:
(Old Spike)
according to that survey only 20% worked from home. What did the rest do, take time off?
(Old Spike)