The government propaganda by USA and some other countries and the stubbornness of Japan is absolutely disgusting. They want to give the illusion that the process is managed well. It’s not. Testing on a massive scale should have been done like South Korea did. It’s too late now.
Seems like the hospitals in USA would rather have their elderly medical workers die rather than accepting PPE from China. (One major problem is that China uses UVC radiation to sterilize medical products, US does not. But seriously who cares when one method is not superior to another and it could be a life and death situation for a doctor or nurse) The hospitals do not want to risk legal liability because, yeah.. being sued is more of an issue than losing valuable, experienced healthcare workers in risk group..
Now that the Olympics have finally been postponed we finally see a surge in infection.. I wonder how bad is it?
What kind of excuses are the politicians going to give their citizens once the health crisis is over? They all claim to be “transparent”.. are they really going to be “transparent” and say:
“I didn’t care about my doctors because legal consequences are more important”
“I didn’t care about my citizens because we didn’t want to lose face for Olympics”
“I kept emphasizing the process is being managed well while I was doing the bare minimum because I worry about my votes”
“Government agenda comes first. I don’t care about the frontliners at all”
Even south korea didn't mass test. They have a population of 52million and ran around 360k tests so far. What they did was aggressively track potential contacts of infected people and test those. This is the same approach Japan does.
I'm not quite sure what you actually mean with mass tests. Tests of random people without any indication might discover a few more cases with light or no symptoms, but they will also give a false sense of security.
No country has the capacity to really mass in the sense of testing everyone in a reasonable time frame. Not even close and that's not a matter of being stingy ... you need laboratories and people who do those tests.
I don't know what test capacity Japan has. Germany apparently stated yesterday that they can do 500k tests a week now and that's supposedly the unrivaled frontrunner in Europe. Will only take them about 3years to test everyone once.
Not saying that Japan did everything perfectly, but they did comparatively well. If the virus was running wild here like in Italy/Spain/France or New York, they wouldn't be able to hide that.
Many shops have a decrease in customers upwards of 70% leading naturally to social distancing. All the staffs wear masks (and I have no idea where those come from), tables get always disinfected before/after use. A sushi place were I often went to started a month ago to always leave empty seats between customers ...
There are a lot of small things being done, that together apparently slowed it down quite well so far.
Now this weekend, at least in Tokyo, we get to the next level. Much more places will get closed.
