The West should envy Japan’s COVID-19 response

On Jan. 1, the world total of coronavirus cases was 83,748,593 and deaths 1,824,140. Japan’s corresponding figures were 230,304 and 3,414. Unusually, in Japan the disease killed more people in autumn-winter than spring. Still, for balance and perspective it’s worth noting that more Japanese died from 25 other causes in 2020. COVID-19 accounted for only 0.3% of all deaths. There were seven times as many suicides and 40 times as many flu and pneumonia deaths. Japan was also one of the few countries without excess mortality caused by COVID-19.

Japan attracted world notice for neither imposing a lockdown nor obsessively testing asymptomatic people. As Tomoya Saito put it in these pages, “Encouraging people with mild or no symptoms to take PCR tests would have revealed nothing but resulted in isolating false-positive cases.” The Stringency Index has been developed by Oxford University’s Blavatnik School in collaboration with Our World in Data to gauge the strictness of nine lockdown measures including school and workplace closures and travel bans, with 100 being the most strict. Japan’s index stayed below 50 until Dec. 8, whereas all its G7 partners have mostly stayed above 50.

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