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Why has Italy (60 million people, median age 46) had almost two orders of magnitude more deaths than Japan (126 million people, median age 48)?
I don’t know.
Similarly, why has Northern Europe had a lower death rate per case than Latin Europe (Italy, Spain, and now France)?
A really clear North vs South picture is emerging in Europe.
North (including Ireland) has low death/ICU rates.
South (including France) has high death/ICU rates.
UK/USA are inbetween.
This might be down to testing, but I wouldn't say it's the only reason. pic.twitter.com/MwxcPjhXIn
— David W. Higgins (@higginsdavidw) March 18, 2020
Worldometer is one of the more popular scoreboards for tracking coronavirus cases by country. One concern is that obscure methodological issues might be getting in the way of making apples to apples comparisons between countries. Who knows how precisely all these different countries count cases and deaths?
The kiss of death in Godfather II
Maybe Northern Europeans are more introverted than Southern Europeans, so there has been less community spread?
Might explain how Japan has (so far) sidestepped the worst of it: they notoriously live more virtually from their rooms, whereas Italians live more in the streets and cafes. The Japanese tend to need to get drunk to be super-sociable, while Italians don’t.
One test case of this will be Finland, which hasn’t been too hard hit so far. We will see whether it plays out more on the Italian or Japanese trajectory.
Suggestions include: Italians kiss, Americans shake hands, Japanese bow.
It’s the cheek kissing.
Seattle was smacked, yet Vancouver was spared, in comparison. Climate and demographics, similar.
This is much like El Paso placing among the safest large cities in the US, while, just across the rivulet, Juarez was the world’s most violent city.
Uh… border control?
And now for the story that surprises no one.
New study says ‘high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce’ spread of COVID-19
https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-says-high-temperature-high-213034915.html
Italy, France and Spain have a dry ass California type Mediterranean climate....
Germany, etc are more green and humid.
The humidity is suppressing the rampant spread of the virus.
It rains less in southern Europe....and drier....nicer weather(never gets too cold or hot) means ppl go out and socialize more etc
This increased socializing in southern Europe combined w the humidity in No. Europe are suppressing the rates of infection in So. Europe....
Iran is dry as hell too....hence their huge outbreak....
I don’t know about this assumption about the Japanese, Steve. Japanese cities are very crowded, with lots of restaurants and tiny cafes where people are often packed in nice and tight.
My baseline theory: people in northern Europe and east Asia take rules and regulations seriously. When they’re told to implement all of the annoying practices that add up to ‘social distancing’, they obey. I suspect there is less compliance with these dicta in southern Europe (at least before things got really bad), and in the USA and UK, although both of the latter countries also seem to be experiencing abrupt turnarounds in attitude, at least in some sectors of the population.
Your first point above makes sense, though. I also wonder if the Italian penchant for physical signs of affection, combined with lots of families with young people still living with elderly parents or grandparents, provided a kind of viral spread superhighway.
None of this still explains the very low ICU and death rates in Germany, though.
That's the question, in my opinion. I have a theory, backed up by absolutely no facts: the Germans did a much better job than anyone else of segregating their old people.
One data point is that when Japanese people catch a cold, I believe they wear a mask to protect other people.
https://zoomingjapan.com/life-in-japan/why-japanese-wear-surgical-masks/
Portugal, Spain, and Italy are the Floridas of Europe. They have a higher proportion of elderly EU residents who retire to those countries to get away from winter.
Secondly, people in Spain, Italy, and Portugal smoke more than those in the UK or the Scandinavian countries. They’ve got more people with damaged lungs.
Thirdly, Northern Europe is ‘flu country.’ A lot of people in Northern Europe get respiratory viruses every year during the long, dry, cold winter, so they have a lot of herd immunity to coronaviruses. Southern Europe doesn’t get much flu, so has less herd immunity. During the 1918 pandemic, the fatality rate in Portugal, Spain, and Italy was twice the rate of Northern Europe.
Also, the poster who said ‘cheek kissing’ was right on the money.
“None of this still explains the very low ICU and death rates in Germany, though.”
That’s the question, in my opinion. I have a theory, backed up by absolutely no facts: the Germans did a much better job than anyone else of segregating their old people.
Steve remember the commenter last week who had the interesting humidity-is-the-key theory? ….. I think that guy was actually mistakenly seeing the tropical countries with MALARIA RESISTANT POPULATIONS which connects to the chloroquinine issue… maybe that guy was also talking about the malaria angle? I can’t rmemeber.
The malaria thing also ties into the lack of black patients and lack of virus spread in subsaharan Africa?
Anyway the scientist Didier Raoult and other Frenchmen have maybe solved this crisis?
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3825982/posts?q=1&;page=1#1
Check out the results of mixing chloroquine with azithromycin:
The attorney repping these guys has been on fox news shows past couple nights and now they’ve released the “peer reviewed study”
Attorney addy is twitter.com/riganoesq
…..
Japanese flu drug 'clearly effective' in treating coronavirus, says China
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/japanese-flu-drug-clearly-effective-in-treating-coronavirus-says-china
And indeed they also try hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) and HIV treatment drug Lopinavir/ritonavir (Kaletra)
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200317/p2a/00m/0na/026000c
"However, an individual related to Japan's Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare pointed out, "We've given Avigan to 70 to 80 people, but it doesn't seem to work that well when the virus has already multiplied. The same goes for Kaletra.""
Do we have actual data on the growth rate rather than just the total cases? Maybe Italy’s just a few weeks ahead of the rest of us.
It doesn't really look like northern europe is doing better, things just got started a few weeks earlier in southern europe.
I am more puzzled by Greece vs. Italy (5 deaths in Greece) and also Turkey vs. Italy (2 deaths in Turkey). Even if one subscribes to Bad Italy theory (and now Bad Spain, Bad France …), I have never heard of a Good Greece or Good Turkey theory!
Italy has fewer hospital beds per 100,000 of population than Germany or Japan, by far, as I mentioned the other day. On the other hand, Italy seems to have more ICU/Critical Care beds per capita than the Scandinavian countries.
So, who knows?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
Northern Europe is a damp, rainy place. Italy, Spain, and (at least, southern) France are much more arid.
We’ve discussed ad nauseam the role of humidity….
Germans are also rule-followers.
(Now why should Singapore--full of Chinese people--have evolved into a place which is vastly more disciplined than China itself??)
Lots of NEETs (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”) and hikikimori (shut ins) in Japan who stay home, play video games all day, etc. Also lots of old people are isolated and live and die alone.
One time I was in Rome and was awakened by a riot in the street one floor below. The clamor drove me to the window, where I saw downstairs three men having an engaged, but not especially angry, conversation.
That's the question, in my opinion. I have a theory, backed up by absolutely no facts: the Germans did a much better job than anyone else of segregating their old people.
They didn’t segregate anyone, and they took lockdown measures later than other countries. Maybe it just comes down to having more ventilators and beds for the critical patients.
It’s air pollution. Take a look at a map of nitrogen oxide (NOx) levels in Europe, and you’ll see a huge concentration over northern Italy. The mountains to the north trap the pollution (same as in Los Angeles), so it’s far worse than other places with similar population density.
Here’s a map of particulate matter (PM10) levels, which is a good proxy for general pollution:
wikimedia map
Northern Italy is clearly highlighted on the map. We might expect other clusters of Covid-19 to emerge in the red areas of Poland, but they hardly see any international visitors compared to Italy. I’d watch out for Belgium as the next big crisis zone. Pollution is high, the population is dense, and they get a lot of international traffic.
Japan and Finland will both be fine, because they have far better air quality.
It’s because Italians live with or constantly visit their elderly parents and are physically affectionate with them.
Germanics and Japanese don’t visit their parents often and do not kiss them when they do.
Incidentally, Chinese and Iranians, much like Italians, maintain close relations with their parents.
Except it’s taking off in Southern Florida now …
I'm just saying , 3,000 >8.
Antiviral drug: favipiravir
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/03/18/japanese-flu-drug-clearly-effective-in-treating-coronavirus-officials-say/amp/
To answer my own question, there are some nice graphs of various countries here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/infection-trajectory-flattening-the-covid19-curve/
It doesn’t really look like northern europe is doing better, things just got started a few weeks earlier in southern europe.
Confirming something you mentioned in a recent post I’m seeing quite a few people handwaving the higher death rate in Italy as due to higher rates of smoking.
As are the Japanese, and we won’t even mention Singapore.
(Now why should Singapore–full of Chinese people–have evolved into a place which is vastly more disciplined than China itself??)
Could be. But a great way to have more ventilators and beds for the critical patients would be to segregate the old people.
If there are any medical people I’d be interested in what you think of this guy, a doctor, who says we’ve got it wrong about the coronavirus. He is well known in Germany.
Wholly and solely due to the enormous and technically illegal Chinese textile worker population in northern Italy. Nothing more, nothing less. Toleration of uncontrolled immigration has *real* consequences – despite what the shitheads at The Economist tell you.
As far as I know, the Japanese do not ‘look the other way’ at a presence of a massive uninvited Chinese population.
Also Japan and Thailand are the top destinations for Chinese tourists. The top Chinese tourist destinations are all East and Southeast Asian countries, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. are all bigger Chinese tourist destinations than Europe.
I'm sure there's a connection between the Chinese workers and tourists and the outbreak in Italy, but some other factor seems to be involved in the severity of it in Italy vs. it in Asia.
As far as I know, the Japanese do not 'look the other way' at a presence of a massive uninvited Chinese population.
Why not Chinese tourists in Italy as well?
Related:
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224661041495212032?s=21
Maybe the Japs are pretending their dead elderly are still alive so they can keep collecting the pensions … it wouldn’t be anything new.
I don’t understand why Finland would be a test case. They are at least as reserved as other Scandinavians. They are famous for being taciturn and for always carrying knives. When they do socialize, it tends to be in very hot saunas. Not sure if the Chinavirus could survive in these saunas.
Just a diffuse response to this, and some comments above, and the general question:
0) Masks in Asia and the habits surrounding their use must be considered before any other theory of different behavior of covid19 in Asian countries as opposed to Western ones.
1) Comparing differences in mortality/critical case rates across Europe is just measuring differences in national diagnostic capacity. This is what German academics and government officials are telling Germans right now, they have been saying it for days, it is not just my crazy theory, though I get that it is boring.
2) Right now, across Europe, if you’re dying of viral pneumonia in a hospital, it seems likely you’ll get a covid19 test. So deaths would seem to be a somewhat better measure of what is happening, and eyeballing it, the death curve seems to be the more or less the same everywhere. It has leveled off in South Korea, and early on the slopes look a bit different here and there, but on the logarithmic scale you see the same rise across countries. (Excursus on Germany’s supposed outlier status, with 12k+ cases and only 28 dead. It took Germany 10 days to go from 0 to 28. It took France much longer to achieve ca. 30 deaths, and Spain made the distance in record time, in a week. Germany is mid-pack here.)
3) Things only seem to be different because national outbreaks took off at slightly different times, surely due to accidents of circumstance when the numbers were quite small, and the exponential curve has magnified these differences.
4) Has anyone argued that r0 is much higher than 3 in Italy? Much lower than 3 in Germany? I have not seen anything to suggest this, and in fact German cases are doubling at a far faster rate than Italian ones right now (again, an artifact of diagnosis efforts more than anything). So, all explanations about Italians and their personal space and their hugging and their kissing are addressing a problem that the evidence has not presented us with. If the virus spreads faster south of the Alps that remains to be demonstrated. Right now it seems to be spreading faster in the north. This point also applies to everything we have had to read about how the Italian climate is particularly conducive to the spread of the virus. This thing is burning just as well in Germany.
5) I hate to crush smoking mythologies, but if this is going to keep coming up, someone will have to present evidence that Italians smoke more than Germans. Germans consume more cigarettes per capita and the few studies I know say they smoke at slightly higher rates than Italians. This also accords with my personal experience. So it is not an explanation for mortality. Northern Europeans less naive to the flu? Well, covid19 is not the flu so that explains nothing.
Also agree on your take on smoking and other pseudo-explanations like Germans take more vitamin D supplements than Italians. People like simple mechanistic explanations with a moral that the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished. And people are suckers for hope. It indeed dies last.
Weren’t the first cases in Italy Chinese tourists?
Related:
Patient 1 got sick enough to seek hospital care, but they only tested him for covid19 when it emerged that he had contact with another Italian who had been to China in January. Patient 1 of course was positive, but the friend whose travel triggered the test wasn't the source: he got a negative result. Nobody knows who the Patient 0 is that gave the virus to Patient 1.
Now, imagine Patient 1's friend had never been to China. We would know literally nothing about this case and our narrative of the Lombardy outbreak would be totally different. And while Patient 1 was surely a prolific spreader, within like a week they had 80 official cases in Lombardy. A good number could be tied to Patient 1 one way or another, but it is an artifact of testing: They were looking in Patient 1's vicinity, and they found cases.
In fact, it seems likely that this whole thing is a sideshow, we have taken what we know and assumed it is the whole truth. Probably the Lombardy outbreak was seeded much earlier than February. People like Patient 0 were already passing it around but it only became official when the disease made it to somebody who had (at one remove) the necessary connections to China to trigger a test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_AyuhbnPOI&feature=emb_title
If you could summarize his argument in 280 characters or less, that might help. As it stands, few of us are going to sit through a ten minute foreign-language video of what looks at first glance like a crackpot conspiracy theory.
He's made a lot of different claims, some of them verging directly that covid19 is just the flu bro (or rather, just a cold bro), but at basis he has complaints about the virus test that Drosten developed in Berlin. He believes something along the lines of, the test is just detecting random coronaviruses, and not necessarily a special novel coronavirus responsible for the viral pneumonia cases in China and now the West. He believes the pandemic is just an artifact of this false test. In one of his interviews he seems to suggest if we had no test we would have no pandemic.
Well, his arguments about the test and its development have been comprehensively disputed by Christian Drosten, the virologist who developed it, in the NDR podcast yesterday. It is clear that Wodarg's understanding of the test and its development is tenuous at best. But anyway, if there were no test, it's clear to literally everyone in Lombardy, as it was to everyone in Wuhan before there were any tests, that something serious is happening to the lungs of especially many older people; and otherwise the arguments about the covid19 pandemic being a financial scam are empty.
But, these guys got an Indiegogo page, where they're on the way to raising 40k Euros, so money is finding its way into somebody's bank account.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/corona-film#/updates/all
Yes British people are notorious for their inability to form an orderly queue. Actually people have taken government information to social distance as seriously as we always do.
In regard to Italy incubation of the virus means there is a lag effect, looking at China the cases should peak March around the 21st in Italy. By then a fair number of Italians will have gained immunity and a fair portion of those likely to die will have done. Interested to see what they do next.
By the way Steve there is an interesting discussion of some of the numbers Ferguson and his team put in to their model on both James Thompson’s and Karlin’s blog, eighty percent infected seems implausible.
Related:
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224661041495212032?s=21
Indeed, the first reported case was a Chinese couple in Rome, 31 January: they had been in the country for 8 days. But more important is the later but catastrophic Lombardy cluster, which began with Patient 1 who became ill on 14 February in Codogno. I find it really instructive to read about the earliest moments of this outbreak, because it shows how arbitrary our view of the early pandemic is.
Patient 1 got sick enough to seek hospital care, but they only tested him for covid19 when it emerged that he had contact with another Italian who had been to China in January. Patient 1 of course was positive, but the friend whose travel triggered the test wasn’t the source: he got a negative result. Nobody knows who the Patient 0 is that gave the virus to Patient 1.
Now, imagine Patient 1’s friend had never been to China. We would know literally nothing about this case and our narrative of the Lombardy outbreak would be totally different. And while Patient 1 was surely a prolific spreader, within like a week they had 80 official cases in Lombardy. A good number could be tied to Patient 1 one way or another, but it is an artifact of testing: They were looking in Patient 1’s vicinity, and they found cases.
In fact, it seems likely that this whole thing is a sideshow, we have taken what we know and assumed it is the whole truth. Probably the Lombardy outbreak was seeded much earlier than February. People like Patient 0 were already passing it around but it only became official when the disease made it to somebody who had (at one remove) the necessary connections to China to trigger a test.
Germanics and Japanese don't visit their parents often and do not kiss them when they do.
Incidentally, Chinese and Iranians, much like Italians, maintain close relations with their parents.
I heard a northern italian journalist make two informed speculations about why North Italy has been hit so hard: (1) the initial outbreak may have started in a hospital which is the worst possible point for spreading; and (2) elderly Italians live together with their children and grandchildren which means the elderly are far more likely to catch it from the young.
Patient 1 got sick enough to seek hospital care, but they only tested him for covid19 when it emerged that he had contact with another Italian who had been to China in January. Patient 1 of course was positive, but the friend whose travel triggered the test wasn't the source: he got a negative result. Nobody knows who the Patient 0 is that gave the virus to Patient 1.
Now, imagine Patient 1's friend had never been to China. We would know literally nothing about this case and our narrative of the Lombardy outbreak would be totally different. And while Patient 1 was surely a prolific spreader, within like a week they had 80 official cases in Lombardy. A good number could be tied to Patient 1 one way or another, but it is an artifact of testing: They were looking in Patient 1's vicinity, and they found cases.
In fact, it seems likely that this whole thing is a sideshow, we have taken what we know and assumed it is the whole truth. Probably the Lombardy outbreak was seeded much earlier than February. People like Patient 0 were already passing it around but it only became official when the disease made it to somebody who had (at one remove) the necessary connections to China to trigger a test.
The origin of an epidemic is a real life illustration of the “butterfly effect.” Someone changes their travel plans, or the wind blows in a different direction at a particular moment, and the fates of hundreds of thousands of people will be changed forever.
The Coronavirus issue is mostly in Lombardy, not all of Italy. Lombardy is more like south Switzerland. Some say Lombardy has a large Chinatown, but everywhere has a large Chinatown at this point.
Doesn’t Japan have those massively crowded commuter trains? And drunk salary men spending all night in Karaoke bars with prostitutes and then sleeping on the sidewalk?
I wonder how coronavirus levels compare with obesity levels? Some videos of Italian hospitals made me think the patients looked overweight.
As far as I know, the Japanese do not 'look the other way' at a presence of a massive uninvited Chinese population.
There are more Chinese in Japan than Italy though.
Also Japan and Thailand are the top destinations for Chinese tourists. The top Chinese tourist destinations are all East and Southeast Asian countries, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. are all bigger Chinese tourist destinations than Europe.
I’m sure there’s a connection between the Chinese workers and tourists and the outbreak in Italy, but some other factor seems to be involved in the severity of it in Italy vs. it in Asia.
Related:
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224661041495212032?s=21
Italy’s probably done the rest of the western world a huge favor by being so far out ahead of the pack – they’ve scared everyone else into actually taking some action. Imagine if every country was now where Italy is.
The guy in the video is a doctor, sure, but he’s also an SPD politician and a crank who previously fielded a lot of similar claims that H1N1 was some kind of overhyped scam to enrich somebody or other.
He’s made a lot of different claims, some of them verging directly that covid19 is just the flu bro (or rather, just a cold bro), but at basis he has complaints about the virus test that Drosten developed in Berlin. He believes something along the lines of, the test is just detecting random coronaviruses, and not necessarily a special novel coronavirus responsible for the viral pneumonia cases in China and now the West. He believes the pandemic is just an artifact of this false test. In one of his interviews he seems to suggest if we had no test we would have no pandemic.
Well, his arguments about the test and its development have been comprehensively disputed by Christian Drosten, the virologist who developed it, in the NDR podcast yesterday. It is clear that Wodarg’s understanding of the test and its development is tenuous at best. But anyway, if there were no test, it’s clear to literally everyone in Lombardy, as it was to everyone in Wuhan before there were any tests, that something serious is happening to the lungs of especially many older people; and otherwise the arguments about the covid19 pandemic being a financial scam are empty.
But, these guys got an Indiegogo page, where they’re on the way to raising 40k Euros, so money is finding its way into somebody’s bank account.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/corona-film#/updates/all
But honestly, none of us really believe that. It'll kill a few more thousand and that will be it. A fraction of the flu. Sadly, we won't be able to relax afterward, because none of us will have jobs due to the depression. :)
Greeks had the benefit of seeing the unfolding disaster and took drastic measures to mitigate the risks. I have heard of people being arrested for operating their business over the last week. It remains to be seen if they will be relatively successful.
All this talk of Italy and Spain compared to northern Europe ignores that a number of countries in southern Europe have had relatively few cases controlling for population size such as the two Hellenic republics, Greece and Cyprus and Portugal. Greece took some serious measures a week ago. Obviously, it remains to be seen how successful they are over time. They could just be a week or two behind Italy and Spain.
Death rate=dead/infected for age>70 in Italy is 1.5 higher than in China. Is Italian medical system providing worse treatment? Is it possible that Italian medical system (death panels) is triaging away the old more aggressively than China and North European countries?
He's made a lot of different claims, some of them verging directly that covid19 is just the flu bro (or rather, just a cold bro), but at basis he has complaints about the virus test that Drosten developed in Berlin. He believes something along the lines of, the test is just detecting random coronaviruses, and not necessarily a special novel coronavirus responsible for the viral pneumonia cases in China and now the West. He believes the pandemic is just an artifact of this false test. In one of his interviews he seems to suggest if we had no test we would have no pandemic.
Well, his arguments about the test and its development have been comprehensively disputed by Christian Drosten, the virologist who developed it, in the NDR podcast yesterday. It is clear that Wodarg's understanding of the test and its development is tenuous at best. But anyway, if there were no test, it's clear to literally everyone in Lombardy, as it was to everyone in Wuhan before there were any tests, that something serious is happening to the lungs of especially many older people; and otherwise the arguments about the covid19 pandemic being a financial scam are empty.
But, these guys got an Indiegogo page, where they're on the way to raising 40k Euros, so money is finding its way into somebody's bank account.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/corona-film#/updates/all
That seems to sum it up. The thing is, as you know, the flu kills about 650,000 people each year worldwide. And so far this coronavirus has killed about 9,000. I mean, is that a pandemic? Maybe it is. Maybe we will see tens of millions of dead bodies stacked up all over the planet in the coming months.
But honestly, none of us really believe that. It’ll kill a few more thousand and that will be it. A fraction of the flu. Sadly, we won’t be able to relax afterward, because none of us will have jobs due to the depression. 🙂
The complete lack of responsibility for the care of others(and inability to math, besides that) is probably why you're in this position in the first place. And like many other things, it will be continuous.
Currently they have 328 cases and 8 deaths. I just don’t think that is taking off. And remember, over 3,000 have died from the regular flu in Florida.
I’m just saying , 3,000 >8.
I’ve lived and worked in Japan for most of my life. There’s got to be some explanation, but I’m not sure what it is.
The Japanese workplace tends to be quite a tight squeeze, smallish metal desks arranged in rows next to one another right and left and facing another row, desks touching each other.
Trains are crowded, especially during rush hours. The images of station staff shoving people into trains is rare, but nevertheless, you are shoulder to shoulder with people. As in Manhattan, a lot of Tokyo and other urban residents don’t have cars.
Young moms congregate daily and talk to one another in the neighborhood at the bus stop. Tweens and teens? Girls especially congregate in Shibuya and Harajuku and so on. School clubs are popular and kids, up to university level, spend a lot of time in their activities.
Many of the recent coronavirus infections were traced to live music clubs, which are patronized by a wide range of ages and are stuffy and crowded.
Japanese from the same company go out to izakaya type places to eat and drink after work in very close quarters, sometimes for hours, maybe once a week, although the younger set has rebelled against this tradition.
Maybe there is a difference in networks: Japanese social networks perhaps are more concentrated in tighter clusters, with fewer between-cluster connections than Italian social networks?
Weirdly, mask-fanatical Japan doesn’t seem to be wearing more masks than usual, maybe because of shortages.
The nightly news shows show cluster diagrams when a new infection cluster is discovered. I’m sure epidemiologists are putting all this information together, and when compared to similar studies in Italy, maybe we’ll find out what’s going on.
In terms of why Japan has not experienced an Italy, I think it's a combination of:
1. Masks -- Japanese regularly mask up in this season, and it's common courtesy to mask up if you're experiencing symptoms. So whether it's the flu or coronavirus, the rate of infection gets reduced.
2. Bows, not handshakes or kisses -- self explanatory. Japanese are incredibly sensitive about "skinship" and there's basically none of it if you aren't very close to someone, or very drunk. Limits the opportunities for person to person transmission.
3. Everyone goes to the doctor for everything:
Up to late February, I think there were ongoing coordination issues, but at this point, the basic approach of the Japanese healthcare system is to rely on citizens to recognise when they are experiencing systems, and then either go speak with a doctor, or call the consultation hotline. People who get picked up through that route then speak with a doctor who orders a test. There have been reports that doctors have ordered tests and not got them, but it's not clear what the timing of those problems were -- whether they are ongoing today, or were an artifact of the initial ramp up in testing capacity.
All of this depends, however, on people reliably going to the doctor when they are experiencing symptoms. And for the most part, Japanese do. You look at the brief case histories released to the public for newly identified coronavirus patients, and a lot of them are Day 1: had a fever, Day 2: saw a doctor, Day 3: suffered at home, Day 4: saw doctor again, got tested, Day 5: confirmed positive, checked into hospital. It's not always that quick, but Japan seems to be doing a reasonably good job of picking up symptomatic cases not because of brilliant top-down bureaucratic coordination, but because people just visit the doctor whenever they feel a bit ill, and doctors have been given a procedure to funnel patients into coronavirus testing when it seems warranted.
There's definitely exceptions -- people who have been identified now, where there was a lag of a week or two between when they first experience symptoms and when they get tested, with days when they went into work normally or commuted by public transit in between, potentially infecting others. But they seem to be more the exception than the rule.
And lastly:
4. Luck. If Japan had a Christian group like Shincheonji out there with congregants infecting people en masse and hiding from medical treatment, well, their methodology has a hard time picking up people who don't show up at the clinic in the first place, and they probably wouldn't catch it in time to prevent a mass outbreak like what Korea experienced.
He's made a lot of different claims, some of them verging directly that covid19 is just the flu bro (or rather, just a cold bro), but at basis he has complaints about the virus test that Drosten developed in Berlin. He believes something along the lines of, the test is just detecting random coronaviruses, and not necessarily a special novel coronavirus responsible for the viral pneumonia cases in China and now the West. He believes the pandemic is just an artifact of this false test. In one of his interviews he seems to suggest if we had no test we would have no pandemic.
Well, his arguments about the test and its development have been comprehensively disputed by Christian Drosten, the virologist who developed it, in the NDR podcast yesterday. It is clear that Wodarg's understanding of the test and its development is tenuous at best. But anyway, if there were no test, it's clear to literally everyone in Lombardy, as it was to everyone in Wuhan before there were any tests, that something serious is happening to the lungs of especially many older people; and otherwise the arguments about the covid19 pandemic being a financial scam are empty.
But, these guys got an Indiegogo page, where they're on the way to raising 40k Euros, so money is finding its way into somebody's bank account.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/corona-film#/updates/all
Epidemics like this one begin locally and are noticed first on the local level. Doctors in a given hospital notice that the number of ICU patients is not the typical 10 or 12 but it is 14 or 16 which is 50% higher.
People like the German doctor make a faulty argument because it is based on global numbers. They say that last year there were 20,000 deaths from a flu, say in Italy, so how come now we get alarmed by just 2,000 deaths form the new disease. But the epidemic is still local (Lombardy and only 35,000 infected) so you can’t compare the 20,000 and 2,000 numbers.
However one may question whether the number of infected correct. Whether the denominator in the ratio to calculate the CFR is underestimated producing higher CFR.
Related:
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224661041495212032?s=21
Someone is going to mash-meme that with the corona challenge where the person is licking an airliner loo. It’s going to be something like “Lick a Chinese Person Today or You Are a Nazi.”
Please tell us how you know this.
The percentage of people who are infected who do not get serious symptoms constitute the body of people who will be immune and unable to pass along the virus. Multiply the number of people who have been tested by 10 or 100 and you quickly get to a very large number of mildly infected.
Know is not possible, due to bad data. How reasonable do you find the guess?
But honestly, none of us really believe that. It'll kill a few more thousand and that will be it. A fraction of the flu. Sadly, we won't be able to relax afterward, because none of us will have jobs due to the depression. :)
Please see ’s comment to me.
The spread of covid19 has been vigorously combatted everywhere in the world and so only 225k cases have been recorded to this day. That is the context within which to see the 9.2k deaths: the 4% rate is surely an overstatement but it is probably ten times more deadly than the flu. To that comes the fact that, if allowed a free run, it would become far more prevalent because, unlike the flu, nobody has immunity to the virus. Indeed it would kill millions in that case, there is no reason to think it wouldn’t.
And that is totally separate from the fact that a very high percentage of officially recorded cases require hospitalisation and respiratory support in icu’s, far far higher than the flu, and so with even very low incidence rates (Italy has maybe 2% of the population infected and is in the middle of an unprecedented catastrophe) your entire healthcare system is overwhelmed.
Sweden does not test or treat. If you are not over 70, they ask that you stay home. If you go to the hospital with symptoms, they send you home without even bothering to distinguish between covid and regular flu, on the pretext that resources need to be saved for the most vulnerable.
Kind of the strategy tried by Trump before Democrats and their friends in US MSM blew up his cover.
It’s not ideology. It’s past that, it’s customs and traditions. Nordics lie through their teeth in order to seem better than they are. For example, polls show them as the happiest nations, but they are in fact world leaders in antidepressant use and middle-age suicide. Chinese and American propaganda, being in great part a salaried occupation, cannot be as effective as the millions of lying Swedes, Danes, Finns and so on.
In contrast, today’s Italians have little use for propaganda. On one hand, they invented it, and are still riding on the benefit of 2.5 millenia of boasts. On the other, this long experience makes them more realistic than most.
The virus is the same. The hand-to-mouth frequency is the same, in particular between places as close as Italy and Sweden. The systemic self deception varies.
We've discussed ad nauseam the role of humidity....
I would be interested to see the difference in death rates between Northern and Southern France, as the country is bisected down the middle by mountain ranges, which separate the low-humidity north from the high-humidity south.
Somebody said the infection rate is highest in the northern parts. But I don’t know.
I’m guessing the virus isn’t really combatted in Latin America and certainly not Africa. So that will be a test in the coming weeks/months.
The Japanese workplace tends to be quite a tight squeeze, smallish metal desks arranged in rows next to one another right and left and facing another row, desks touching each other.
Trains are crowded, especially during rush hours. The images of station staff shoving people into trains is rare, but nevertheless, you are shoulder to shoulder with people. As in Manhattan, a lot of Tokyo and other urban residents don't have cars.
Young moms congregate daily and talk to one another in the neighborhood at the bus stop. Tweens and teens? Girls especially congregate in Shibuya and Harajuku and so on. School clubs are popular and kids, up to university level, spend a lot of time in their activities.
Many of the recent coronavirus infections were traced to live music clubs, which are patronized by a wide range of ages and are stuffy and crowded.
Japanese from the same company go out to izakaya type places to eat and drink after work in very close quarters, sometimes for hours, maybe once a week, although the younger set has rebelled against this tradition.
Maybe there is a difference in networks: Japanese social networks perhaps are more concentrated in tighter clusters, with fewer between-cluster connections than Italian social networks?
Weirdly, mask-fanatical Japan doesn't seem to be wearing more masks than usual, maybe because of shortages.
The nightly news shows show cluster diagrams when a new infection cluster is discovered. I'm sure epidemiologists are putting all this information together, and when compared to similar studies in Italy, maybe we'll find out what's going on.
My subjective impression in early March 2020 was that mask wearing in Japan was up significantly from the March norm — normally, I’d expect something like 30-40% of people to be in masks either because they had colds/the flu or because of seasonal allergies. It was up to something like 95% or higher in Tokyo at the start of March, at least in Shinbashi, Ginza, Marunouchi, etc. Unmasked people out in public were quite rare. My impression now is that mask wearing is down, maybe 70-80%, but I suspect that’s partly due to mask shortages. It’s almost impossible to find masks.
In terms of why Japan has not experienced an Italy, I think it’s a combination of:
1. Masks — Japanese regularly mask up in this season, and it’s common courtesy to mask up if you’re experiencing symptoms. So whether it’s the flu or coronavirus, the rate of infection gets reduced.
2. Bows, not handshakes or kisses — self explanatory. Japanese are incredibly sensitive about “skinship” and there’s basically none of it if you aren’t very close to someone, or very drunk. Limits the opportunities for person to person transmission.
3. Everyone goes to the doctor for everything:
Up to late February, I think there were ongoing coordination issues, but at this point, the basic approach of the Japanese healthcare system is to rely on citizens to recognise when they are experiencing systems, and then either go speak with a doctor, or call the consultation hotline. People who get picked up through that route then speak with a doctor who orders a test. There have been reports that doctors have ordered tests and not got them, but it’s not clear what the timing of those problems were — whether they are ongoing today, or were an artifact of the initial ramp up in testing capacity.
All of this depends, however, on people reliably going to the doctor when they are experiencing symptoms. And for the most part, Japanese do. You look at the brief case histories released to the public for newly identified coronavirus patients, and a lot of them are Day 1: had a fever, Day 2: saw a doctor, Day 3: suffered at home, Day 4: saw doctor again, got tested, Day 5: confirmed positive, checked into hospital. It’s not always that quick, but Japan seems to be doing a reasonably good job of picking up symptomatic cases not because of brilliant top-down bureaucratic coordination, but because people just visit the doctor whenever they feel a bit ill, and doctors have been given a procedure to funnel patients into coronavirus testing when it seems warranted.
There’s definitely exceptions — people who have been identified now, where there was a lag of a week or two between when they first experience symptoms and when they get tested, with days when they went into work normally or commuted by public transit in between, potentially infecting others. But they seem to be more the exception than the rule.
And lastly:
4. Luck. If Japan had a Christian group like Shincheonji out there with congregants infecting people en masse and hiding from medical treatment, well, their methodology has a hard time picking up people who don’t show up at the clinic in the first place, and they probably wouldn’t catch it in time to prevent a mass outbreak like what Korea experienced.
What about the China vs Japan hygiene discrepancy? That’s what got us into this mess. East Asians have a bit of diversity then.
The malaria thing also ties into the lack of black patients and lack of virus spread in subsaharan Africa?
Anyway the scientist Didier Raoult and other Frenchmen have maybe solved this crisis?
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3825982/posts?q=1&;page=1#1
Check out the results of mixing chloroquine with azithromycin:
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hydroxychloroquine_final_DOI_IJAA-24-1024x546.jpg
The attorney repping these guys has been on fox news shows past couple nights and now they've released the "peer reviewed study"
Attorney addy is twitter.com/riganoesq
.....
favipiravir – also known as T-705, Avigan (Wiki)
Japanese flu drug ‘clearly effective’ in treating coronavirus, says China
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/japanese-flu-drug-clearly-effective-in-treating-coronavirus-says-china
And indeed they also try hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) and HIV treatment drug Lopinavir/ritonavir (Kaletra)
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200317/p2a/00m/0na/026000c
“However, an individual related to Japan’s Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare pointed out, “We’ve given Avigan to 70 to 80 people, but it doesn’t seem to work that well when the virus has already multiplied. The same goes for Kaletra.””
Dan Hessen MD or w/e his name on here keeps positing this theory.
Italy, France and Spain have a dry ass California type Mediterranean climate….
Germany, etc are more green and humid.
The humidity is suppressing the rampant spread of the virus.
It rains less in southern Europe….and drier….nicer weather(never gets too cold or hot) means ppl go out and socialize more etc
This increased socializing in southern Europe combined w the humidity in No. Europe are suppressing the rates of infection in So. Europe….
Iran is dry as hell too….hence their huge outbreak….
Some of the comments here are explaining why transmission rates might be higher in Southern Europe, but that’s not, by itself, the issue. It’s the death rate of those who do get it that is of note.
Possibilities:
* Does a higher initial viral load affect disease progression, in general? Perhaps social kissing gives a higher initial viral dose versus what happens in more reserved, distant societies.
* Different nutrient status — do more people in the north take vitamin D since they don’t get any sun?
* Genetic susceptibility for Mediterranean people?
* More virulent strain in S. Europe?
* Climate differences. For example, is dry south France worse off than the rainy north?
* Reporting/testing differences exaggerate the real differences
Chinese woman I know who lives in Sweden complained the other day how when she dons a face mask the Swedes look at her like she’s insane, with a bit of “it’s all your fault you gook” thrown in.
She wants to yell at them “It’s a citizen’s duty to wear a surgical mask during flu season to protect society from their own possible nasal and oral discharges, you morons! It’s not about being afraid or not being afraid, it’s about being a decent human being!”
So no, the nords do not appear to be taking this seriously, at least not the other day they weren’t.
Likewise the Finns appear to be on the verge of performing worse than Albania in reacting to the epidemic. It’s one thing to have a bunch of affirmative action women pretending to be able to ran a government while the invisible structures of society, built by actual efficient people, help maintain the pretense of the estrogen committee being able to govern.
But once an unexpected crisis arises, and you have to actually modify the invisible structures of society to cope, instead of going through the motions while the invisible structures do the actual work for you, then… Then it turns out that a Scandinavian estrogen committee performs worse than the lowliest Eastern European govt made up of kleptocratic thugs and weasels.
Back in the day Thatcher had to out-compete other statesmen on their own terms in order to become head of government. Hence, once on top, she was an actual peer to Reagan and Gorbachev and all other world leaders.
But today’s crop of Western stronk wymyn did not outcompete strong smart ruthless men to get where they are. Instead they were simply funneled there *because it’s their turn*, while being “celebrated” and “affirmed” and “nurtured” every step of the way.
Which is why when a government is made up of them, even in Finland or Sweden, they can only pretend to be good at what they do while 90% of the job is done on autopilot by the invisible structures which they did not build, and indeed “try to dismantle for greater justice”. However, once an actual real life crisis pops up, the dog faced estrogenic pony lesbians revert into a hen-house of thin-lipped harpies pretending everything is under control while their minds scream “Somebody do something!”
And the average nord is no great shakes either. Still thinks he can be calm and reasonable and that’ll defeat coroniachan. Or help deal with Arab grooming gangs or Somalian bomber thugs. Bloody nords. What happened to them? Who did this to them?
But honestly, none of us really believe that. It'll kill a few more thousand and that will be it. A fraction of the flu. Sadly, we won't be able to relax afterward, because none of us will have jobs due to the depression. :)
What’s annoying about people like you, is like Lance Welton, even if you get proven wrong and even if we do get millions of dead bodies, you won’t admit it. You’ll just shrug it and find some other excuse.
The complete lack of responsibility for the care of others(and inability to math, besides that) is probably why you’re in this position in the first place. And like many other things, it will be continuous.
The part with the highest infection rate is the border region to Germany.
As far as I know, the Japanese do not 'look the other way' at a presence of a massive uninvited Chinese population.
Is there large Chinese presence in Iran too? How about in Spain and France?
Is there a Chinese presence/Chinatown in Greece? How about in Turkey?
The Greeks don't like foreign food much - there's not a long tradition in Greece of eating other people's cuisines (with the slight exception of Italian). In Athens you can find a few "ethnic" restaurants but they are vastly outnumbered by Greek places - TripAdvisor lists 1300 Greek restaurants in Athens vs. 30 Chinese restaurants (and I'll bet a big part of their trade is tourists). And once you get outside of Athens, fuggedaboutit. You had better like eating Greek food because that's all you are going to get outside of tourist spots. Greek food is pretty good but if you are ever there for an extended period then after your 11th identical moussaka you do start to crave some sushi or something - Americans are used to eating a much more varied diet.
You would have to look at the daily figures to answer this question. In the early stages of infection, without any control measures, the number of cases grows exponentially. The UK was 2 weeks behind Italy and 7 weeks behind Wuhan. Is Northern Europe simply at an earlier stage of the epidemic than Southern Europe? Or is the exponential growth slower in the North, or is there some difference in clinical outcomes?
THOUSANDSOFAUSTRALIANSOLDIERSDESERTEDINWW2MALAYSIA . Americanaidsvirus,Americanswinefluvirus,mexicanswinefluvirus,americancoronavirus.
The percentage of people tested << the percentage of people infected. My guess: no more than 10% of people who get infected get sick enough to go for a test. Of the people who are tested, I don't know the percentage who are infected.
The percentage of people who are infected who do not get serious symptoms constitute the body of people who will be immune and unable to pass along the virus. Multiply the number of people who have been tested by 10 or 100 and you quickly get to a very large number of mildly infected.
Know is not possible, due to bad data. How reasonable do you find the guess?
Viruses can live on the hands and even in the noses of persons immune to them for a limited time. If such persons, carrying such viruses, contact other persons not immune to those viruses, those other persons absolutely can contract the virus from the immune persons.
There is a news reporting truism (though today not practiced much in the click-bait hype world of pseudo journalism) that first reports are usually wrong. In some significant respects. Now with cell phones and the Internet, raw data or manipulated images or self serving “data” is also a factor.
Conclusion: that much of the speculation here and now is going to prove seriously inadequate. Add to that the Chinese Communist inherent tendency to lie about things and instead follow today’s Party Line and you have what? A huge mess. Assume China isn’t “recovering” like they claim.
Also, what are we not seeing? Reporting from the shithole countries (to borrow a phrase) is obviously mostly absent or misleading. Even advanced nations have poor epidemiological reporting infrastructures. Physicians or non professional bureaucrats who typically run “ministries of health” or whatever in these places are usually political hacks and are not suitable for actual medical practice. They aren’t all bad, but most are not actual doctors treating the sick. Add to that the third world tendency (and even first world) of sugar coating bad news. Does anyone think the stats out of Asia, Africa, L. America are comprehensive and complete? Even here the stats are slowly evolving.
Bottom line: immigration will be the new battleground. The southern US border will largely close (as is being done quietly). This will rage in poor, corrupt places though many there already die of other things anyway. This will add to misery because it spreads so easily and social isolation, the main preventative, is very hard in nasty crowded slums or family centric rural farms.
Italy passed China today in most total deaths so far: 3405 vs. 3245. The slope is quite steep too: 427 per day vs. 8 per day. Spain is mirroring Italy, almost perfectly. (803 total deaths, 165 per day)
No, not really. Until recently Greece was more of an exporter than an importer of immigrants. What immigrants they have are mostly from much closer than China – the Balkans, E. Europe, S. Asia, the Middle East, Africa, etc. Chinese are rare.
The Greeks don’t like foreign food much – there’s not a long tradition in Greece of eating other people’s cuisines (with the slight exception of Italian). In Athens you can find a few “ethnic” restaurants but they are vastly outnumbered by Greek places – TripAdvisor lists 1300 Greek restaurants in Athens vs. 30 Chinese restaurants (and I’ll bet a big part of their trade is tourists). And once you get outside of Athens, fuggedaboutit. You had better like eating Greek food because that’s all you are going to get outside of tourist spots. Greek food is pretty good but if you are ever there for an extended period then after your 11th identical moussaka you do start to crave some sushi or something – Americans are used to eating a much more varied diet.
Great comment. Yes, “mortality/critical case rates across Europe is just measuring differences in national diagnostic capacity” and methodology and philosophy. This obviously gives lots of fuel to conspiracy theories that this is just a hoax, made up in media and so on.
Also agree on your take on smoking and other pseudo-explanations like Germans take more vitamin D supplements than Italians. People like simple mechanistic explanations with a moral that the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished. And people are suckers for hope. It indeed dies last.
The percentage of people who are infected who do not get serious symptoms constitute the body of people who will be immune and unable to pass along the virus. Multiply the number of people who have been tested by 10 or 100 and you quickly get to a very large number of mildly infected.
Know is not possible, due to bad data. How reasonable do you find the guess?
Immunity ≠ incommunicability.
Viruses can live on the hands and even in the noses of persons immune to them for a limited time. If such persons, carrying such viruses, contact other persons not immune to those viruses, those other persons absolutely can contract the virus from the immune persons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_AyuhbnPOI&feature=emb_title
Watched the whole thing. Seems reasonable enough. He’s arguing that in any given year 7-15% of flu is caused by coronavirus. Taking him at his word, his argument progresses from there – that there really is no epidemic – just the flu. He then argues that scientists have every reason to hype the situation to politicians.
You make a valid point. Just because your immune system has turned the tide and can resist virus replication (and thus generation), it does not remove all the viruses on your clothes, skin, etc.
Got any figures on how long that is? I doubt it is like herpes, which you never really get rid of. But I’m not a virologist.
Central Europe is doing much better than even the northern
part of Western Europe. Contrast Germany with Poland and
Czechia:
Germany (82 mln) 15,320 cases, 44 dead, 183 cases/mln
Poland (40 mln) 355 cases, 5 dead, 9 cases/mln
Czechia (10 mln) 694 cases, 0 dead, 65 cases/mln
Both Poland and Czechia are high-trust, homogeneous, cohesive
countries with very small numbers of the foreign born. This serves
them well during a time of crisis like the present one. Similar
stats apply to the other two members of the Visegrad group,
Slovakia and Hungary.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-muslim-mosque-closure-prayer-nhs-a9411936.html
Up to a quarter of British covid deaths are Muslims, like Italy they have multi generational living.
How would you characterise the climate there? Are there any micro-climates that may affect things?
The more I think about it the more I agree – at the early stages of the pandemic, random events delayed or accelerated its spread because there were only a few carriers. Once it got going it became much more predictable in its growth – most the western nations have similar growth curves.
Finland has just 359 cases and 0 deaths. Most of my elderly relatives died of flu/pneumonia, especially, after a fall in the winter. Many elderly die of flu, more than from this new virus.
A fun site I check has people convinced that vodka kills Covid, and they recommend 2 drinks a day. There was also some discussion that Akvavit (made from caraway seeds) is even better due to caraway seeds being especially healthy! Either way, I have been both in CA & at ski areas (not staying at resorts) and have been fine for weeks now, with my 2 vodka drinks a day. Also, I consume a ridiculous amount of anti-oxidant foods, vitamins, and tea, milk (ya, like a kid) every day, year ’round. And, I only drink Icelandic high Ph water – glad to know Tom Brady drinks my brand, too.
I hope the lock-down of states (NY, NJ, CT & CA, now) does not lead to riots, violence and death which so many Democrat governors, senators, congresspeople are so horny for. It is really disgusting; they are lusting for violence, death from disease or by releasing prisoners to commit crimes…which ever method kills more people.
The absolute creepy lust for death, destruction, tanking of the economy is so obvious. I really hope these people suffer at the polls or get called out on their death wish. Their bloodthirstiness and ruthless nihilism is so obvious. It’s also, sort of hilarious that they don’t even hide it!
I have never seen anything like this. Therefore, I will be a reverse immigrant and go back to Finland where I don’t have to deal with American leftists creeps. Democrats have truly become dangerous. They & the media’s hate for the American people is incredibly awful. People in my town are starting to panic because they are seeing the larger picture of the “stay in place.” Guns are being bought like crazy! My single, retired female friends are locked & loaded. I feel kinda’ scared not having a gun, right now.
The complete lack of responsibility for the care of others(and inability to math, besides that) is probably why you're in this position in the first place. And like many other things, it will be continuous.
Oh get off your high horse. I’m not spreading germs. And if there are millions of my people who wind up dead, I will be sad. But there is simply no reason to believe that this is the level of threat that keeps being pushed.
Isn’t one obvious difference between Japan and Italy the 400,000 overseas Chinese (who are concentrated in one section of Italy)?
Don’t think Japan has the equivalent.
Also don’t think Japan has anywhere near the constant Chinese tourist flow as Italy.
Btw Daily Mail has really busted the boycott of the Chinese labor story in Italy. Kudos to them for defying the cartel. But DM is so weird. It is very PC on certain issues while other sacred cows are slaughtered. I assume the place is Mi6 controlled but if so they love to stick it to American CIA controlled media by busting the boycotts on certain issues.
Otherwise mainstream western media maintains almost a complete embargo of the Chinese in Italy issue.
Japan also has (had) a lot of expatriate Chinese.
In the early days of the outbreak, aside from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, ALL of the cases in Japan (from Hokkaido through Aichi down to Kyushu) were related to either Chinese tourism or Chinese expats (e.g., in Kyoto, there was a Chinese foreign exchange student).
Don't think Japan has the equivalent.
Also don't think Japan has anywhere near the constant Chinese tourist flow as Italy.
Btw Daily Mail has really busted the boycott of the Chinese labor story in Italy. Kudos to them for defying the cartel. But DM is so weird. It is very PC on certain issues while other sacred cows are slaughtered. I assume the place is Mi6 controlled but if so they love to stick it to American CIA controlled media by busting the boycotts on certain issues.
Otherwise mainstream western media maintains almost a complete embargo of the Chinese in Italy issue.
Link?
Don't think Japan has the equivalent.
Also don't think Japan has anywhere near the constant Chinese tourist flow as Italy.
Btw Daily Mail has really busted the boycott of the Chinese labor story in Italy. Kudos to them for defying the cartel. But DM is so weird. It is very PC on certain issues while other sacred cows are slaughtered. I assume the place is Mi6 controlled but if so they love to stick it to American CIA controlled media by busting the boycotts on certain issues.
Otherwise mainstream western media maintains almost a complete embargo of the Chinese in Italy issue.
Japan is a major location for Chinese tourism. So major that at high points in the tourist season, you can get on trains or walk down the street in some places and just hear Mandarin. I know because I have experienced that.
Japan also has (had) a lot of expatriate Chinese.
In the early days of the outbreak, aside from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, ALL of the cases in Japan (from Hokkaido through Aichi down to Kyushu) were related to either Chinese tourism or Chinese expats (e.g., in Kyoto, there was a Chinese foreign exchange student).
Northern Europeans probably have more natural immunity (acquired or innate) to contagious respiratory illnesses.
Easy, culture and cleanliness.