[thonos]

Living in Japan, the handling of the virus has been nothing but disappointing. We entered "state of emergency" but besides schools and a few stores closing nothing has changed. It is less people than before but the trains and buses are still packed, there are lines at the supermarket, even fast food chains (for takeout) and convenient stores, and families now chill outside and meet other families because children are at home. Parks are filled with people and the governments response has consistently only been "please stay at home" which, based on my experience of doing grocery runs, got ignored mostly outside of the major areas like Shibuya/Roppongi. Some business like pachinko parlors flat out ignored the governments requests and the reply to that was "close down or we will publicly announce your name".

People that got sick weren't allowed to take the test unless they fulfilled some checklist someone came up with. People with pneumonia symptoms got turned away at hospital after hospital and instead asked to rest at home which also had an effect on the low number of confirmed cases.

Some articles of people that got confirmed coronavirus but instead of getting quarantined, asked to please not work and self isolate (<- there are also reports of people that were sick for weeks but just continued working with a mask until they were no longer able to). Same for charter flights and people from the cruise. Some people just denied getting tested, so they went home directly.

I have no idea how Japan got away with this but it's true that we are much better off than other countries. The official numbers don't reflect reality a single bit, but I can't argue about the low number of fatalities.

[keenmaster]

- Japan has one of the lowest obesity rates in the world

- Japanese people have no hangups about masks and social distancing

- There aren’t quite as many large, touchy feely inter-generational family gatherings as in Italy

- Even if people aren’t strictly following stay-at-home orders, they might have confidence that with the common wearing of masks and social distancing, they’ll probably be fine, especially in outdoor environments. You know this more than me, but Japanese people tend to have higher attention to detail. They can more effortlessly be aware of situations where they may get infected, and they won’t just say “oh well I’ll take the risk,” they’ll put in the little amount of effort to mitigate getting infected.

[tinus_hn]

All of the things you mention are probably an eyesore if you believe in the lockdown doctrine but in the end what matters is the results. If they don’t do what you want but get good results, perhaps you want the wrong thing.

[brenden2]

Japan has pretty low rates of obesity and heart disease, that might be related to the low death rate from the virus.

[lbeltrame]

Or perhaps the virus did not make way into hospitals or nursing care homes. That's what happened in Italy, with hospitals turned into infection centers. And hospitals have a significant number of people at risk in them. Same for nursing care homes.

[esyir]

This is the country with the most dramatically aged population though. I'm rather surprised.

[thonos]

Yeah that’s a plausible theory

[rurban]

It had also been observed that Japan was cooking their numbers, esp. before they called of Olympia. Their official spreadsheets consisted of cut&paste images. Very similar to Russia, Turkey and Germany.

We will only know the true numbers with the excess mortality numbers. But given the circumstances it will still be a 0.2% IFR country according to my estimations. Not worrying at all.