[m_mueller]

What I find confusing though is Japan's low death numbers. I was assuming that spikes in mortality couldn't be hidden, but recent comments from inside sources in Japanese hospitals are starting to make me doubt this assumption. Still, there is not a crisis on Lombardia-level going on, which one would expect given the relative inaction of Japanese government. I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in the middle - Japan's reported numbers are underestimating the issue, but at the same time Japanese society is as a whole more resistant than at least Southern Europe.

[will4274]

I mean, look at the comorbidity data - heart disease, hypertension, diabetes - aren't the Japanese one of the healthiest people in the world?

[lazyasciiart]

Yes, but the population is even older than in Italy, which is also a big factor.

[EE84M3i]

One theory is that people are dying but it hasn't been discovered yet because of people staying inside. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

Having just ridden the Yamanote today though, it's unreal how empty it is.

[aikinai]

I doubt there's much overlap in people who have so little human contact that no one knows they're dead and people who catch viruses that are still present in only a tiny fraction of the population.

Oh, and a third condition that these people be such recluses that they don't even call a doctor when deathly ill.

[makomk]

Even people with little human social interaction need to get groceries from somewhere...

[toyg]

Dude, you're talking about the country that christened the hikikomori phenomenon...

[TheCoelacanth]

There are undoubtedly recluses, but do they also have frequent contact with people to catch diseases from?

[toyg]

You can catch covid in many ways, it lives on hard surfaces for days.

[btilly]

Japan is a country where at the best of times, a lot of people die at home and are not discovered for some time. If you remove social contacts thanks to lockdown, this is going to become more common.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi for more.

[nostromo]

Yes, that happens sometimes, but no, there are not thousands of unnoticed dead people in their apartments in Japan.

Occam’s razor in this case is that the pandemic in Japan isn’t as bad as the author projected. It’s not a conspiracy or coverup and there aren’t dead bodies hiding everywhere, the author was just wrong.

[btilly]

Here are the facts as we have them.

From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/ Japan admits to about 10,000 cases now, with a doubling time of about 11 days so they will admit to 20,000 cases by the end of the month.

If you read https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/20-254565.pdf you will find credible reasoning for 90% of COVID-19 cases not being tracked in official numbers, with a wide uncertainty. That correction would make it 200,000 cases in Japan by the end of the month. If you update that argument with the lower IFRs suggested in https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-... then you get to a projection of 500,000 cases in Japan. (The admittedly problematic Stanford study came up with a suggestion of similar underreporting factors in both Santa Clara and Los Angeles.)

Alternately we could arrive at a similar conclusion if you assume that Japan is doing less testing than average. And there is considerable evidence that this is true.

We therefore do not have reason from the officially reported figures that he is wrong.

Now let'd deal with the dead bodies argument.

Deaths trail infections with roughly a 3 week lag. (A week to get sick, 2 weeks to die.) Let's go back to the simple model of 90% of infections are not reported and the true fatality rate is 1%. On March 31 there were 1700 official cases. On that model there were 17,000 infected of which 170 should die. Guess what? Today there are officially 263 dead bodies.

We. Don't. Even. Have. A. Shortage. Of. Known. Bodies.

The stated conclusions only look absurd to anyone who HASN'T tried to understand the dynamics of exponential growth, and the problems with the official data. He might or might not have been correct. But directionally he was clearly a lot more right than the official government position at the time.

[XorNot]

"Sometimes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting during a viral pandemic which hasn't been matched in severity for the last century.