As you know, despite being right next to China – or perhaps because it is right next to China – Japan is having a good coronavirus outbreak. Despite getting it earlier than Western European countries it has had fewer cases and fewer deaths (349 at time of writing). Why is this? I’d had it down to mask-wearing which as anyone who has ever been to Japan will know is very common.
But I wasn’t quite sure, so when the other night NHK (that’s Japan’s equivalent of the BBC. Think bad, but not that bad) had a documentary on the subject I thought I’d take a look. So, what did they say? The first thing that struck me is that they are bricking it. They – meaning the team that has been set up to study the outbreak – can see this killing a lot of people. They in no sense feel that they have turned a corner. They look enviously at the South Koreans and Singaporeans who had far better testing capacity. That’s not to say they aren’t proud. “I had every faith in the Japanese people.” says one.
Another aspect is the way that Japanese government is formally powerless but informally quite the reverse. There is no legal lockdown in place in Japan because – they say – they don’t have the powers. So why doesn’t the government grant itself those powers like they did in Britain, one wonders? They don’t say. But it would appear that the government “requesting” that people stay away from bars and other crowded places has had the effect of law.
The approach of the study team was – and it may well have changed since the documentary was filmed – to study in detail the outbreaks that occurred. They concluded that the big spreader was the 3 Cs: (En)closed; Crowded; Close Proximity. I must admit that I thought crowded and close proximity meant the same thing. But I guess that crowded refers to the number of people present. One of Japan’s hottest of coronavirus hotspots turned out to be a “Blitish pub” – whatever that may be. I was amused to see that their chief modeller spent time at – you guessed it – Imperial College. So there’s a very good chance that they’re using the same dodgy, secret code that we are. It’s not just viruses that get transmitted from human to human.
What they didn’t do was address why they are doing so well. Considering the size of Tokyo and the scale of commuting there you would have thought it would be far worse. So, I’ll stick with my original hunch. Masks work.
Masks work. Usually but not always. Two days later I was in hospital.
‘They in no sense feel that they have turned a corner.’
That’s because they haven’t. Rather, they were slow to get it, but then the surge of infections began on 29th March, since when it has been accelerating, with no sign of topping out or slowing down yet.
They are, in other words, late entrants to this one, and there’s no reason to think they’ll be able to weather it any better than anyone else. Possibly worse, given the elderly demographics. So, they should indeed be bricking it right now.
The only reason there is a lock down in the UK is 70 million largely are going along.
The media noise has suggested wide scale breaching, but actually it’s the opposite. Real breaches are rare.
There are 120,000 cops and a few thousand cells.
If the public come out for a Sun bathe and can’t be persuaded back inside, lockdown is over.
Isn’t sun bathing to be encouraged? I was under the impression that viruses thrive during winter partly because of vitamin D deficiency caused by lack of exposure to sunlight. That and spending lots of time indoors. It is almost as if those government guidelines have been deliberately designed to make things worse.
“Isn’t sun bathing to be encouraged?”
Sun bathing in your own garden is to be encouraged, yes.
Why should sunbathing elsewhere be a problem, as long as people are staying more than two metres apart? In most cases, people seem to be more than two hundred metres apart.
“Why did they not give themselves the powers?” Asks Patrick.
Perhaps because Japan, in spite of its very real faults, is not a place where there are no limits on government power – there is a Japanese Constitution.
Patrick – as you know Japan used to have a government that could grant itself whatever powers that it wanted (just like Britain).
This did not turn out well – 1945 and all that.
Perhaps the United Kingdom will have to go through a similar experience.
Then we can tell the followers of Sir Francis Bacon, Sir William Petty, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume (yes him to) and Jeremy Bentham……
FUCK OFF AND BURN IN HELL – take your doctrine that there are no rights AGAINST the state and FUCK OFF AND BURN IN HELL.
I hope I have been clear.
So, we’re basically saying that the Japanese populace are not a bunch of silly twats, and respect medical advice?
Before needing an authoritarian government to actively say “Alright, enough now”?
There’s a lesson there, certainly. Probably one that the contrarians will not learn, mind.
Masks and fresh air. My corner of the world has laughed off the virus because poor people in hot rural communities live outside, going inside only to sleep.
The West Coast homeless didn’t do too bad untill the government moved them inside to shelters.
Distaining masks and banning parks and beaches is pure insanity.
Well The Telegraph reports today that an NHS directive ordered hospitals to send elderly Covid-19 patients who’d recovered back into care homes, thereby sending in a vector for the virus to enjoy a target-rich environment.
Perhaps in Japan they aren’t that callous, and have a lingering sense of honour?
Stonyground,
Because it is the Regulation! They are only giving orders! See regulation 6. You may only leave the place that you are living if you have a ‘reasonable excuse’, or face an unlimited fine. Reasonable excuses include (but are not exhaustively defined) ‘exercise’ ‘work’ ‘medical treatment’ and so on. They do not include posting a letter, dogging or sunbathing. But if you did exercise whilst sunbathing, Plod may have a problem.
Note also, the offence is leaving your home without a reasonable excuse, not the sunbathing as such, that is where dispersal orders come in. And if you leave your home to buy basic necessities, surely that qualifies as the excuse for leaving home, and if you incidentally buy some Dom Perignon or sunbathe, that does not mean that you did not have a reasonable excuse when you left your home. As noted, vagrants are exempt from these restrictions, so if you lose your home due to the economic chaos during the shutdown, you’ll be free to wander around without let or hindrance.
“Why should sunbathing elsewhere be a problem, as long as people are staying more than two metres apart? In most cases, people seem to be more than two hundred metres apart.”
They haven’t precisely explained their reasoning on this, but I would have thought the obvious explanation was that it was to limit the number of people outside at any one time, reducing the density of people as much as possible.
Lots of people want to go out to the parks and beauty spots. If they all were allowed to do so, the places would become packed, and it would become impossible to maintain the required two metres. That’s what happened the weekend before the lockdown. Boris asked people to keep their distance, and said their ability to do so would decide whether a lockdown would have to be imposed. They were photographed that weekend in large masses, unable to keep a distance. They meet at the choke-points – the entrance/exit to the park, the car park where they’re packed in close together, narrow paths with people walking in both directions. Several parks had record highs of people visiting. As the density of people increases, continuous separation becomes impossible.
If 1% of the people who want to go out go out, and the rest stay home, then it is possible to maintain a distance, but how do you decide on the 1% who get to do so? The rules have to be kept simple. The people have to be kept unified, all in it together. You have to avoid rather obvious sources for resentment and division. You can’t let everyone do it. Any rules you designed to pick the 1% in a way that was deemed ‘fair’, covered all eventualities, and guaranteed a low enough density everywhere would be complicated, hard to understand, easy to misunderstand, easier to cheat and manipulate, and would likely lead to disputes and angry people with tape measures shouting at one another on the street. So the simplest and most likely to be effective measure is to simply forbid it to the 1% as well. Yes, the safety fence is further from the cliff edge than strictly necessary, but you’re dealing with ordinary people here. Stuff you might find obvious, many find incomprehensible.
It’s the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. If a very limited resource is open to everyone, it gets overused and damaged. The market solution would be for the owners of the Commons to sell an appropriate number of tickets at the market price, which would naturally mean the richest 1% would get them all and the poor would get nothing. Can you imagine how that would go down, politically?! Tempers are already frayed. A significant portion of the population think the lockdown should be even stricter. There is resentment and anger over rule-breakers. The rural areas are already in near-insurrection over townies fleeing to their country homes. Can you imagine their reaction if rich Londoners bought up all the available leisure slots in the countryside, while they were shut up in their homes? Nobody is going to understand or accept the libertarian argument, here.
Like I said, I’ve not see anyone from the government go through their thinking here. But having thought for even a moment about how one might try to implement something else, I think it’s pretty obvious why they did it as they did, and why they don’t want to start an argument about it.
Nullius – you appear to be defending “lockdown” style thinking.
Millions of lives are now at stake – at risk from the economic collapse that the lockdown is leading to (the wild government spending can not be sustained – people need to go back to work).
Even Denmark is allowing shops to reopen – because even Welfare State Denmark can not just carry on paying people to sit home and do nothing.
It is quite clear now that the lockdowns have NOT saved lives – one can see that by comparing Sweden to lockdown countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
In the United States, those States that rejected lockdowns have NOT had a higher death rate than those States that went down the totalitarian “lockdown” road.
“But the anti lockdown States are more rural” – yes indeed they are, but even allowing for that, they have NOT had a higher death rate.
I am sorry Sir – but it is just not acceptable to ignore the evidence of the last couple of months and carry on typing as if government policy was sensible.
The policy of “lockdown” governments is not sensible, it has NOT saved lives, and it is economic madness – and economic collapse would cost MILLIONS of lives.
The totalitarian “rule by scientific experts” experiment has been tried – and as the late Maurice Cowling and M.J. Oakeshott would have warned us, it has been a disaster.
The “lockdowns” must end – and proper medical treatment (with medicines) needs to be given to the sick. Which means that the lies of the “mainstream media” (“the President wants to inject you with disinfectant”) must also end.
It is now brutally clear that the mainstream media do not want the sick to get proper medical treatment – they want people to die (hence their constant lying – their efforts to discredit medicines that can help people). And it is also now clear that the mainstream media want (yes want) economic collapse – even though they know that economic collapse would cost MILLIONS of lives.
“Nullius – you appear to be defending “lockdown” style thinking.”
I’m defending evidence-based thinking.
NiV,
I’m all for evidence. What evidence do you have that COVID-19 can spread in the open air?
What possible reason do you have to think that it doesn’t?
Farts are air born. Have you ever smelled a fart while strolling though the park? It’s called dissipation.
No Nullius – you are not defending “evidence based thinking”.
The evidence is now in – and it shows that the lockdown policy does not save lives. This is quite clear by comparing countries that have gone down the totalitarian road and those countries that have refused to do so. And by comparing those American States that have embraced totalitarianism with those States that have not – even taking allowance for the latter generally being more rural than the former.
There never was any “evidence” that lockdowns work – this was a new policy that had not been tried before, so there could not (by definition) be any “evidence” for the policy.
Now the evidence is in – both comparisons of different nations and comparisons of different States in the same nation (the United States). And the evidence shows that the policy of totalitarianism was a failure – if the purpose of the policy was to save lives.
So you were never, at any time, defending an “evidence” based policy Nullius – and now you are willfully ignoring the evidence Sir.
Your totalitarian (total control of the population – based on force and fear) policy has not saved lives – and it has caused vast economic harm which will cost many lives.
“Have you ever smelled a fart while strolling though the park? It’s called dissipation.”
Thank you. That makes it easier to understand where you’re coming from.
So we can consider a couple of other examples of airborne emissions – cigarette smoke (or vaping ‘smoke’) and perfumes or aftershaves. When in the company of smokers outdoors, have non-smokers ever smelt the smoke and been heard to complain about it? When vapers vape those weird vanilla concoctions, and you walk within a few metres of them, can you detect it? Have you ever smelt somebody’s perfume as you pass them in the street? Have you ever smelt smoke from a fire some distance away? Have you ever smelt the smell when a dog walker pauses to allow his charge to lay a soft one?
Aerosols are diluted faster in windier, more open conditions, but there is clearly still plenty of person-to-person ground-level air transfer. I didn’t think there was anyone who was unaware of smells being able to travel some distance, even outdoors.
And to answer your question, yes I have, although in the most recent (and most memorable) case it was a dog rather than a human! 😳
Apparently I have a defective sense of smell then then because I’ve never noticed any of those things on a stroll through the park, except possibly a bonfire, which hardly counts. Perhaps your park is busier than mine, but being close enough to someone to over hear their conversation would be considered rude. There is also the time factor to take into consideration, walking past someone in the open versus sitting next to someone on the tube.
My point stands, it is supposition that the virus can be caught in the open because there is not, nor can there be, any evidence to back that up. See also my comment at 11:56.
“The evidence is now in – and it shows that the lockdown policy does not save lives. This is quite clear by comparing countries that have gone down the totalitarian road and those countries that have refused to do so.”
It’s *not* clear. The spread of an epidemic is dependent on dozens, probably hundreds of influencing factors. The epidemic started at different times in different countries. They have different population densities, different age profiles, different transport networks, different balances between public and private transport, different socialisation patterns, different family sizes, different city sizes, different commuter numbers, locations, distances travelled. Two countries having different rates could be for any of a hundred reasons. You can’t so easily disentangle them.
All you’re doing is dredging the data looking for cases to confirm your beliefs, and ignoring any data that goes against it.
Lots of countries have gone through the same process. It starts off with the politicians not taking it seriously, and being unwilling to take action. Boris, reportedly, was *very* unwilling. Then the number of deaths starts increasing 10-fold a week. It goes 1, 10, 100, and the scientists shout at the politicians that the series goes on 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,0000 before it starts running out of people to infect. It’s like letting go of a brick from an upper-storey window: it’s a matter of simple physics to know it will accelerate unless and until something *stops* it. It’s how viruses work.
In the UK and Sweden the numbers started going up 10-fold a week. Sweden did something, and the numbers turned a sharp corner. The slope of their line levelled out. In the UK it didn’t. It dropped from 10-fold per week to around 10-fold every week and a half, but that was not nearly enough. If it had carried on, we’d have been through the roof in May/June/July!
When the message penetrates – that the trajectory you’re on leads to millions dead, that there’s a two or three week lag between taking action and seeing any effect, so at 10-fold a week the problem is always 100-1,000 times bigger than it appears, and that your current mild actions simply aren’t working, the data is still going up – the politicians finally react.
90%+ of the UK population have been able to understand the problem. The plague was spreading exponentially, the milder measures were not working, even with hospital treatment 1% die (which is about half a million dead), it’s pretty horrific even for those who survive hospital, and if the hospitals are overwhelmed and people can’t get treated, well that could cover ten times as many. Civilisation would no doubt survive, but the cost would be horrendous. By contrast, the costs of a lock-down are easily affordable – at least for rich countries like ours. It’s a significant financial blow, yes, but it’s on the order of an extra year paying off the mortgage. It’s on the order of missing out on foreign holidays and luxuries for a few years. We’re not going to starve. We’re not going to die. And 90% of the population have been able to understand all this, and are in full agreement with the government’s decision on their behalf. In fact, a significant portion think they haven’t gone far enough!
You’re entitled to your opinions, but you’re worrying over nothing. Boris is the nearest thing we’ve had to a libertarian since Maggie, and he’s not going to keep the lockdown going for any longer than he has to. The economy will recover. And hopefully only a relatively small number of people will suffer/die. They’re not ignoring the lessons of other countries. They’re not ignoring the development of medicines and vaccines. They’re not ignoring the economy, or the threat to liberty, or risking the public’s support and goodwill. And if you don’t soon pay attention to what everyone else can see, you’re credibility with the public is going to take a hit. How are you ever going to persuade them, when you don’t listen to them, and keep on insisting on making claims they can see are not true?
Paul (and Nullius): please take another look at the evidence.
But this, from Nullius, is a valid point:
And Paul is not the worst case!
I’m delighted to see this evidence of your confidence in the reasoning and judgement of so high a percentage of the UK population. I certainly see their marked loss of confidence in the media in recent weeks as evidence of their possessing common sense (see a fellow Scot’s take here).
I think much tolerance of the lockdown to date relates to such ideas as “better safe than sorry” and “assume the scientists/ministers know what they are doing till it is clear(er) that they do not”, rather than a resistant-to-change belief that lockdown is unanswerably the right answer to the current problem. Today, both Labour leader Starmer and remoaner ex-chancellor Hammond spoke of the dangers if the economy is not reopened – excellent news if it means they know that returning-to-work Boris is thinking along the same lines, so chose to get in first. Awareness that lockdown also kills people, not just their savings, is also spreading.
I predict that if rumours of some opening-up in May prove to have content, MSM wailing will be much louder than popular concern.
My understanding is that masks protect other people more than they protect the wearer. If everyone wears one, they are protected. If a sick person does not then the virus will land on the damp mask and that’s no different to landing on the skin.
“Paul (and Nullius): please take another look at the evidence.”
As I noted previously, there are confounders with data of this sort.
“I think much tolerance of the lockdown to date relates to such ideas as “better safe than sorry” and “assume the scientists/ministers know what they are doing till it is clear(er) that they do not”, rather than a resistant-to-change belief that lockdown is unanswerably the right answer to the current problem.”
I agree. And I think everyone is looking for better solutions.
“My understanding is that masks protect other people more than they protect the wearer.”
That’s what SAGE have said.
I’ve also seen papers indicating the main problem is the fit. Cloth masks tend to leak air around the sides, so they only have a 30-70% effectiveness. That goes up to over 90% if you fit a tight, stretchy fabric over the top. (They suggested ladies tights, as a home-made option.)