Still getting people in my comments insisting that Japan must be hiding tens of thousands of new cases, because the decline in the official numbers doesn't match their expectations of how outbreaks happen and are contained. But the decline is real, not an artifact of testing.
You'd think the example of an elderly society that did very little to contain an outbreak and got it under control would attract more attention. Either what they did was extraordinarily effective (masks? cluster chasing?) or there's another factor at work, or both those things.
How did Japan, a country of 126 million, start to see a sharp rise in infections, including community spread in major cities, do very little, and then end up with fewer official coronavirus deaths than Maryland? How did Iraq do it? Why did Portugal fare so much better than Spain?
Bayesians, please, spread your wings—this is your moment!
I watched with horror in late March here in Kyoto as entire families went to the local public baths, people congregated in parks to check out the cherry blossoms, restaurants and bars stayed open, and then two weeks later... the infection numbers nationwide began a steady decline
The prize for anyone who solves this mystery is that city life gets to continue at Tokyo and Osaka levels, rather than New York City levels, without making a Sweden (or America!)-like tradeoff where we just accept a high steady level of new fatalities. It's a puzzle worth solving
The current level of public discourse, where it is taken as axiomatic that any country that has kept the body count low must have better policies in place than countries struggling with large outbreaks, is unsatisfying. A particularly egregious example: nytimes.com/2020/05/10/wor…
I watched a loved one get cancer because Romanian doctors couldn't conduct a simple Pap smear (despite claiming it was invented there). The examining room they put her in had a pyramid of cabbages in it. I don't buy for a minute that Eastern Europe is now an oasis of competence
Unfortunately, the idea that the former communist world and developing countries can outperform America and western Europe in public health fits a certain ideological predisposition. We want the virus to dunk on the US health care system! So too few people are asking questions
If we don't pay attention to the baffling geographical discrepancies in the impact of this disease, then we will simply be ceding this ground to whatever "covid truthers" eventually emerge as a cohesive political force, and it will be infinitely harder to talk about this sanely
For the time being, you can still say "the central dogma of how major outbreaks happen and are contained doesn't seem to fit the facts" and not be declaring your political allegiance to something. But that window is closing. Already I'm getting called a right-winger! (Hail hydra)
