I was going to write a long article about this, but I just don't have the time, so a thread about covid-19:

I live in Japan, a country with about 1/3 the population of the US.

Using the two measures most people care about, Japan has done a poor job of handling covid-19. There have not been nearly enough tests, and contact tracing has been a failure.

(The reason for the lack of tests is that if someone tests positive, by law they must be hospitalized, even if they are asymptomatic or have light symptoms, and there simply aren't enough hospital beds to handle this eventuality.

The failure of contact tracing appears to be that many people who have contracted the disease are reluctant to admit that they were at hostess bars, etc.)

However, despite these failures, this last weekend the country was pretty much completely reopened. Why? Because the number of new cases has dwindled to almost nothing.

While it is not quite zero, it is incredibly low compared to the US. Altogether, there have been 17,780 confirmed cases in Japan, and 955 deaths.

Of course, the rejoinder to these figures is that since there has not been enough testing, the rates could be much, much higher.

Many Japanese have wondered if that might be the case, so they have used other means to try to suss out the truth. For example, have more people been flooding into the hospitals with respiratory illnesses and have there been more deaths of pneumonia? Not really.

However, this is anecdotal, so the government has done serum tests in Tokyo--the main covid hotspot--to see exactly how far the disease has spread.

These are not tests to see who currently has the disease: These are tests to see who has antibodies in their systems showing that they have at some point come into contact with the disease, even if they did not become infected.

The result? Only 0.1 percent of people in Tokyo tested positive for antibodies against the coronavirus. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/16/national/science-health/tokyo-coronavirus-antibodies/#.XvAsPvJS-ZY

To put this into context, 0.7 percent of Americans have tested positive as having caught the coronavirus.

Another way of looking at things is that NY City has had more coronavirus deaths than people have caught the disease in Japan, despite NY State having 1/6 the population of Japan.

So, even if the number of people in Japan with coronavirus is much higher than being reported, by every measure the disease has been nearly stopped in its tracks compared to the US.

So what has Japan done differently than the US? Two things:

First, there has been clear and consistent messaging from the government from the very beginning, involving the Three C's.

Second, even before the virus hit, nearly everyone in Japan wore a facemask at even the first sign of illness. After the virus hit, just about everyone began wearing facemasks whenever they went out. And when I mean just about everyone, I mean easily 99.9% of people.

As I said, apart from these two measures, Japan has largely failed in facing coronavirus, and in fact Abe is being harshly punished for that failure (among other things) in the polls.

However, if having less than 1,000 deaths looks like failure, what would you call America's response to the virus? Does 119,969 deaths look like success?

There are two lessons we can draw from this:

First, the political leadership in the US needs to get its act together and present a clear, consistent, and accurate message on how the virus is spread and how its spread can be prevented.

Second, people need to wear facemasks whenever they go out.

There's really no other way around this. The virus won't simply go away. It isn't a leftist trick or an election ploy. You want to end the madness? Wear a facemask. It is as simple as that.