Updates on the Corona Virus in Japan

Greetings all.

So for the sake of trying to give people an honest and fair assessment of what is happening in Japan with the Corona virus situation, I thought I would share information from conversations I had with a friend who works directly under Japan’s Minister of the Environment. (環境省)

While the information he shared is nothing top-secret, it is a current and objective assessment of the situation from a governmental position. He is also the father of a young child who takes his child’s safety as seriously as I do my own. Over the years I have gone to him for situational assessments on everything from Fukushima Nuclear Crisis to the last super typhoon. I’ve found I can always trust him to just be honest, straight-forward and objective.

In this blog, I'll talk about the current state of the Corona virus here. In the next blog I’ll get into the current thinking on what is going to happen with the Olympics.

The Current Situation: 

While Japan started off with a higher number of cases than other places (which personally I think is from how the Diamond Princess situation was handled), as you can see from the graph, the rate of infection here is actually way slower than most other places (which may in part be due to the fact that that situation made everyone wary from get-go). We still haven’t hit the peak of the curve here yet, but compared to most other places Japan still has one of the lowest rates of infection. It’s thought to be for the following reasons. Most of them are cultural. 

• Even before the virus, as Japanese people are used to living in extremely tight quarters, they already had a culture of avoiding physical contact. Generally even within families people rarely hug, kiss, or touch each other or even get in close proximity (in compared to other places like Italy where people hug and kiss to say hello)
• Additionally, along the same lines people also already have a culture of wearing masks on a daily basis to protect others from catching infectious diseases. Masks don’t do much for protecting you; but they do actually work for protecting everyone else from you.
• Central Air conditioning systems are generally not widely used here. (Instead Japanese people usually use stand-alone one room units) Central Air Conditioning is how they think it spread through hospitals in Italy so quickly. For example, an infected person in one room sneezes, it gets into the system, and is spread through the air conditioning system. (Japan has already taken steps to stop using air con on the trains and is using an alternate back-up system of cooling them with air from outside.
• People here usually keep the windows open all the time. (Even in the winter). While this particular behavior stemmed from the fact that it’s extremely humid and everything molds quickly, in this case, it is also thought that proper open-air ventilation makes a big difference in slowing the spread of the virus.
• In general, contrasting with westerners, Japanese people tend to be more pessimistic and worry-prone. Particularly when it comes to health and disease because, again, everyone lives so close to each other. As such, even if the government response was slow, the response of the people was fast compared with the west. 

In effect, while a lot of these things have always been difficult to deal with as a foreigner living here (the fact that no one likes to hug; the windows are always open even when it’s cold, the fact that people seem excessively risk-averse, etc) in this case they have all created a culture that is well prepared for dealing with this kind of thing.

How safe is it to go out?

Right now the government has classified the country into 3 likes of areas: 

• High-risk 
• Medium-risk
• Low-risk

Low-Risk Areas
In the current thinking, because the national contraction rate is so low, it’s basically okay to get back to business as usual... but provided that everyone remains careful and cognizant of the fact that the threat is still there.

Medium-Risk Areas

This is where Tokyo falls. Insomuch as I know, Hokkaido currently has the highest rate of infection. As such, it is thought that people can return to going about their business, but they need to proceed very very carefully, avoid excessive time with other people or lots of personal contact, and follow protocols of regular hand-washing, keeping windows opens, keeping a bit of distance and trying not to touch others or one’s face.

High-Risk Areas
It’s still best to practice social distancing as much as humanly possible.

All that being said, as aforementioned, it also important to remember that we still haven’t hit the top of the curve yet, so if people relax too much, that can change at any moment. Basically we can carefully proceed to getting back to life as usual, but if things take a turn for the worse, its important that to remember that we could go right back to having to be on lock-down. In general, the fastest way to spread infection is still travel however, so it's still best to avoid international travel and/or traveling between cities, being on rush-hour trains, etc as much as possible.

Also, just for everyone's information, here are the sites that I am getting the charts from. They offer current updates on the situation in both Japanese and English for anyone that wants to check regularly.

https://www.anzen.mofa.go.jp/covid19/country_count.html
https://www.anzen.mofa.go.jp/covid19/pdf/graph_suii1_E.JPG
 https://www.anzen.mofa.go.jp/covid19/pdf/graph_suii2_E.JPG
https://www.anzen.mofa.go.jp/covid19/pdf/graph_suii3_E.JPG https://www.anzen.mofa.go.jp/covid19/pdf/graph_suii4.JPG

Hope this helps!