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Daily WHO Reports for the Coronavirus Outbreak (Link)

RandomTokyoGuy said:
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.
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I am sorry but this is a load of nonsense. Claiming that Japan is doing the same as South Korea is just flat wrong. South Korea policy has been to test the largest amount of people they can in order to detect asymptotic people and isolate them. Japan is not doing that whatsoever.


RandomTokyoGuy said:
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.
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This is not true since it may be possible that Japan is actually completely missing the extent of the infection since like in South Korea, a lot of asymptotic people may be carrying the virus. The available data in Japan are just not enough in order to say whether or not they did well. They aren't producing enough data, plain and simple. In any case, the comparison with Italy/Spain/France makes also little sense because those countries are seeing a large amount of people with serious/critical conditions which was actually was not seen in other countries like South Korea.
 
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MikeH said:
There are just few countries that haven't started to lock down cities; Japan and Sweden pop to mind first. And this far they seem to be doing pretty much OK. Is it luck or is it that they have done just enough to stop the virus spreading we will know only later..
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We can't say which country is doing OK or not because they simply are not facing the same situations. Forget about the number of infected people since it's difficult to compare between countries with different testing policies, forget about the number of deaths, again because the comparison is difficult. The good metric right now is the number of people in critical/serious conditions overwhelming the heath care system which happen to be way higher in some countries than other because of reasons which are still not clear. So the decision of locking down a city or a country really depends on that.

MikeH said:
However it doesn't seem that any country in the Europe is actually trying to prevent the virus from spreading. They are just trying to slow it down so that it goes through the population slow enough not to crash the health care system. With this approach we also will know only later if it works or not. But even if it does it still kills a huge number of people in the risk groups, just at a slower pace.
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Countries adopting some level of confinement of people by definition are trying to prevent the virus from spreading further and having even more people in critical conditions in two weeks from now.

MikeH said:
For some reason it doesn't seem that any country is doing what South Korea did; test like hell, trace all the contacts of those who tested positive, test like hell again, rinse and repeat. I have no idea why nobody tries to copy this; at least it seemed to work for Koreans.
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Germany is doing even more.
 
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Simonka said:
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”
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In the context of Japan, one positive from this experience, is that it has got me thinking about how I am going to survive a major earthquake in Tokyo. It is pretty clear it we can't rely on the "planning" and efforts of bureaucrats and politicians. They may have spent time working out how many vending machines will fall over and lots of other small details .... but I think we going to be "up the creek" when the big one hits us. We will be left to fend for ourselves for days, weeks, or months.
 
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joeking said:
I assumed 'mass test' means allow people to get tested whenever they want (at a relatively low cost) and do mandatory testing of contacts. In Korea, the test is free if you test positive and pretty cheap if you don't. Japan is not doing that.

http://www.japansubculture.com/germ...ZSS0CAbchwD64wh_2CNIP_8#.Xn0N6U38loE.facebook

I can't vouch for the German translation, but it seems like they aren't too enamored of Japan's approach.
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As a German I can say the headline is worded maybe a bit harsh. The letter doesn't say that Japan is lying, it says that the Japanese numbers are unreliable/unrealistic, because of the low amount of tests....and I think there is no doubt about that. That's just statistics...the more you test, the more cases you will discover.

Best example are the US. In the beginning they tested very little people because of technical difficulties and the numbers stayed pretty low. As soon as the US started testing on a huge scale, shit hit the fan....now they have more cases than any other country. Waiting too long can lead to catastrophic consequences. Same happened in Italy, ignored the danger als Long as they could until it turned into a complete mess.
 
Sudsy said:
RNA is still traceable up to 17 days on, but RNA doesn’t mean viable contagion, just that there are still traces of the virus having been there.
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I was having trouble explaining this concept to non-science types (and even other HCW’s who just don’t know much about PCR). Best I could come up with was just because someone chopped of another person’s hand and then committed a robbery smothering the fingerprints from that hand all over the place, it doesn’t mean the owner of the hand actually committed the robbery. (n)
 
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Danbo, thanks. No german to speak of, so I defer to you. the 'Just the facts' sounds Germanic though... Am curious if this letter (and the fact that they are sending it out) indicates any strong feelings.
 
joeking said:
Danbo, thanks. No german to speak of, so I defer to you. the 'Just the facts' sounds Germanic though... Am curious if this letter (and the fact that they are sending it out) indicates any strong feelings.
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Also to add here, that part is taken out of context. The main message is for tourists to get home while you can as more and more airlines stop service and you may run into a situation where you get stuck for a long time. Japan isn't among the countries from where the EU brings people back home.
The point of Corona is merely that the risk to get infected can't be reliably estimated due to insufficient data. It doesn't even say that they assume the risk to be high or anything.
 
petersamou said:
I am sorry but this is a load of nonsense. Claiming that Japan is doing the same as South Korea is just flat wrong. South Korea policy has been to test the largest amount of people they can in order to detect asymptotic people and isolate them. Japan is not doing that whatsoever.




This is not true since it may be possible that Japan is actually completely missing the extent of the infection since like in South Korea, a lot of asymptotic people may be carrying the virus. The available data in Japan are just not enough in order to say whether or not they did well. They aren't producing enough data, plain and simple. In any case, the comparison with Italy/Spain/France makes also little sense because those countries are seeing a large amount of people with serious/critical conditions which was actually was not seen in other countries like South Korea.
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Or maybe it's you talking nonsense here? It is widely believed that in Italy and Spain the number of total infections is vastly underrepresented by the test, as in general the more serious cases get tested first. Therefore the percentage of more serious cases in the sample is much higher. On top of that, if you need breathing support, but there are no such devices available it automatically makes your case more serious as well.

Here is an overview of South korea
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095848/south-korea-confirmed-and-suspected-coronavirus-cases/

Japan has run about 60k tests so far, but south Korea also has a much higher number of infections. The general approach is the same in both countries try to trace down the infection chain and test people potentially exposed. Korea has those fancy drive in tests. Thumbs up to them.

Of course you can discuss about whether you really need fever 4 days in a row to get tested or if maybe 2 would be enough, but you need to set some sort of threshold as there is no capacity to test anyone with a cold. Just doing more tests for the sake of pimping your statistics has not much use.
 
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Sudsy said:
RNA is still traceable up to 17 days on, but RNA doesn’t mean viable contagion, just that there are still traces of the virus having been there. They’re still testing on that front, so don’t put the cart before the horse.
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So it sounds as if it's similar to just skeletal remains of a corpse which are benign. It confused me because The Mainichi article infers that the virus is still intact whereas the actual report doesn't indicate such. I assume this would be something akin to forensics or trace chemicals.
 
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RandomTokyoGuy said:
Korea has those fancy drive in tests. Thumbs up to them.
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What allowed South Korea to go to extensive testing was that they have their own test manufactured in the country. So they didn't have to try to purchase them abroad and compete with every other country for the availability.
 
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namae said:
In the context of Japan, one positive from this experience, is that it has got me thinking about how I am going to survive a major earthquake in Tokyo. It is pretty clear it we can't rely on the "planning" and efforts of bureaucrats and politicians. They may have spent time working out how many vending machines will fall over and lots of other small details .... but I think we going to be "up the creek" when the big one hits us. We will be left to fend for ourselves for days, weeks, or months.
Click to expand...

Well, look on the bright side. If you're in Japan when a big one hits, you most likely will be on your own for a number of weeks or even a month, but at least you'll be in a country full of lemmings who will just sit in place and cry until an authority figure emerges to tell them what to do, at which point they'll politely and obediently line up and start the process of rebuilding.

If a big one hits anywhere in America, there's a pronounced demographic that won't wait even five minutes for instructions. Nope, if disaster hits, thousands of urban thugs will crawl out of the woodwork (remember New Orleans?) and immediately begin robbing and raping anything not tied down. Widespread looting, assaults and worse, and the average (decent) American is on his/her own for a very, very long time.

Folks in Japan can stockpile food rations, flashlights, batteries and get ready to help their neighbors. Folks stateside stockpile food rations, tactical flashlights and enough firepower to dispatch all their neighbors. I've still got my disaster "go bag" with cash, medical supplies, spare I.D. and some tactical gear...and then the most important components of any doomsday prepping American: my AR-15, AK-47, 12-gauge shotgun, primary pistol and backup pistol both in 9mm and at least a thousand rounds of ammo for each.

I live on the top floor of a high-rise and a good buddy of mine, a retired USMC E-7 who is a dead-ringer for Emmitt Smith, lives down the hall with his wife and is an even bigger gun nut than I am. We have our own contingency plan for doomsday: Shut down the elevators, seal off the emergency exit stairways on both ends of the hall, I guard one end, he guards the other, shoot anyone who tries to get up to our floor and, as "Gunny" puts it, "fuck all those unarmed pussy Democrat motherfuckers below us."

God Bless America.
 
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Keihan Chikan said:
Well, look on the bright side. If you're in Japan when a big one hits, you most likely will be on your own for a number of weeks or even a month, but at least you'll be in a country full of lemmings who will just sit in place and cry until an authority figure emerges..........................
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Your words remind me of this guy I met in a bar 2 years ago. A real interesting cat with claimed Russian spy counter surveillance experiences and ideas on the Am. militia that seemed outlandish but possible. https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27:マックス・フォン・シュラー&s=relevancerank&text=マックス・フォン・シュラー&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
 
Sudsy said:
Yeah, that’s not sound thinking. He should be deploying them around hospitals to keep order.
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Or maybe it was a sinister plot to invade Canada and dump all the Covid sick people there? plus Biden and Pelosi
 
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RandomTokyoGuy said:
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.
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Mass testing doesn’t necessarily mean to test the entire population. What Japan has done until now is wait until people got severely ill before testing. The incubation period is now known to be 2 weeks, within that time period the ones who are not severely ill created more clusters. South Korea was testing more actively than Japan. The Japanese Medical Association thought the test is not profitable at all.
I’m not sure where you live, but where I live people still used to hang out in crowds until the announcement made by the governor and irresponsibly kept holding Hanami parties. Unfortunately, being less than perfect is not an option in the medical field..

On top of this, Hong Kong is now experiencing a reverse influx of coronavirus infections now that sick people are coming back to HK. (They were even stricter about travelers compared to Japan) I wonder what the outcome for Japan will be.
 
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Keihan Chikan said:
Well, look on the bright side. If you're in Japan when a big one hits, you most likely will be on your own for a number of weeks or even a month, but at least you'll be in a country full of lemmings who will just sit in place and cry until an authority figure emerges to tell them what to do, at which point they'll politely and obediently line up and start the process of rebuilding.

If a big one hits anywhere in America, there's a pronounced demographic that won't wait even five minutes for instructions. Nope, if disaster hits, thousands of urban thugs will crawl out of the woodwork (remember New Orleans?) and immediately begin robbing and raping anything not tied down. Widespread looting, assaults and worse, and the average (decent) American is on his/her own for a very, very long time.

Folks in Japan can stockpile food rations, flashlights, batteries and get ready to help their neighbors. Folks stateside stockpile food rations, tactical flashlights and enough firepower to dispatch all their neighbors. I've still got my disaster "go bag" with cash, medical supplies, spare I.D. and some tactical gear...and then the most important components of any doomsday prepping American: my AR-15, AK-47, 12-gauge shotgun, primary pistol and backup pistol both in 9mm and at least a thousand rounds of ammo for each.

I live on the top floor of a high-rise and a good buddy of mine, a retired USMC E-7 who is a dead-ringer for Emmitt Smith, lives down the hall with his wife and is an even bigger gun nut than I am. We have our own contingency plan for doomsday: Shut down the elevators, seal off the emergency exit stairways on both ends of the hall, I guard one end, he guards the other, shoot anyone who tries to get up to our floor and, as "Gunny" puts it, "fuck all those unarmed pussy Democrat motherfuckers below us."

God Bless America.
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Well, yeah. It goes without saying, that given the "choice" of experiencing the "big one" in Tokyo or L.A., I would take Tokyo.

And if I was critically ill with Covid-19 complications, I would prefer to be in Tokyo rather than New York.
 
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split said:
So it sounds as if it's similar to just skeletal remains of a corpse which are benign. It confused me because The Mainichi article infers that the virus is still intact whereas the actual report doesn't indicate such. I assume this would be something akin to forensics or trace chemicals.
Click to expand...
This is a big partner the problem as regards public perception - the news outlets aren’t having their pieces reviewed by people who understand the science.

And your corpse remnant analogy is spot on. The question is if the corpse is like a rattlesnake that can still bite for a bit after it’s dead.
 
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Acid Burn said:
I was having trouble explaining this concept to non-science types (and even other HCW’s who just don’t know much about PCR). Best I could come up with was just because someone chopped of another person’s hand and then committed a robbery smothering the fingerprints from that hand all over the place, it doesn’t mean the owner of the hand actually committed the robbery. (n)
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I’m having trouble explaining gauging down random antivirals will not protect people from coronavirus because not all antivirals work as RNA replication inhibitors..
 
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IchigoDave said:
My oldest is in the hospital awaiting results of her test.
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Just stay positive and remember that even if it comes back positive, with young folks it'll be no worse than a mild flu and she'll probably be back to normal in less than a week. A good friend of mine (31 years old) is currently under quarantine as she went overseas, came back and a few days later her throat hurt and her lungs felt tight. She submitted to a test then went home and that was ten days ago. She's still waiting for the test results (morons in government here) and in the meantime has basically recovered.

We may not know if she caught this virus but her comments basically echoed so many of the accounts we're hearing from anyone who isn't over 70 and with pre-existing conditions: Minor chills, no body aches, mild sore throat, a few coughing fits and lungs felt like they'd shrunk a bit but after three or four days it was basically back to normal.

I'm staying extra careful but not because I give a rat's ass about myself catching it (I really don't, I'm quite fit and healthy) but because I don't want to infect any of the older folks in my family and friends circle. As far as I'm concerned, three or four weeks of paid vacation and my $1200 Trump Check to blow on Amazon while I lounge around drinking and masturbating all day is just fine by me.
 
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