Number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises in Japan

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/14/national/wakayama-positive-coronavirus/#.Xke6CjWIZTs

by fspeech • 6 years ago

58 53 6 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

dis-sys• 6 years ago

Why Japan still refuses to test everyone (or at least all Japanese passengers) on that Diamond Princess cruise ship is just strange at best.

yokaze• 6 years ago

The tests have a true-positive rate of 40%. Could well be, that the tests bring more hassle than they are worth.

deugtniet• 6 years ago

Testing somebody without symptoms is not accurate. Additionally, the current tests are very expensive and remove capacity for other individuals with symptoms.

pwim• 6 years ago

According to this article (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/12/national/scienc...), Japan doesn’t currently have the capacity to test everyone.

usrusr2• 6 years ago

What's the upside? Tests are effectively positive/unknown in absence of truly reliable data about incubation periods etc. You'd treat someone from a high risk group who is tested negative just the same as while untested and without symptoms.

akg_673• 6 years ago

Japan doesn’t have enough testing capacity. Last week, they could do only about 300 tests each day nationwide and expect to increase to 1,000 by next week. Actually, currently no country has capacity to test everyone on a typical cruise ship. Even China has switched to chest x-rays and classifying anyone showing pneumonia on X-ray to be infected.

That cruise ship has put lot of strain on Japanese resources from testing to treatment. Once a persons has been tested positive, preparing hospital to accept that patient is another can of worm.

lifthrasiir2• 6 years ago

Actually, currently no country has capacity to test everyone on a typical cruise ship.

According to their official announcement last week [1], South Korean government is currently able to test 3,000 persons per day and will be able to test up to 10,000 per day by the end of February. Even after accounting for false positives this would be enough to test everyone on a cruise ship.

[1] http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/tcmBoardView.do?contSeq=352788 "그동안 진단검사 기관을 시도 보건환경연구원에서 민간의료기관으로 확대하였고(2.7), 검사가능 물량도 대폭 늘리고 있으나(1일 200명→3,000명), 2월 말까지는 생산업체, 민간검사기관 등을 확대하여 현재의 3배 수준인 하루 1만 건의 진단검사가 가능하도록 확충할 예정이다."

hdiriekei• 6 years ago

Bye bye Olympics. They are practically cancelled.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

The speed and scope of the Chinese response baffles me and it'll be interesting but unpleasant seeing how this plays out in other countries.

The WHO situation reports had 258 confirmed cases in Hubei Province on the 21st of January [0]. Now 3 weeks later China is quarantined and new emergency hospitals have already built. The speed and organisation behind that response tells me that the fog of uncertainty still lies heavy and whatever the Chinese government estimates might be they are not being published in the WHO situation reports.

As other countries start managing outbreaks the picture of exactly how bad this is will be a clearer. In no small part because the monitoring infrastructure will be ready in advance of cases appearing.

[0] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

zzrush• 6 years ago

Cause government gets so used to hide information, they thought they could have hidden this from their people and the world as well.

makomk• 6 years ago

It looks like the rapid hospital building was basically a PR stunt - once they were "finished" they remained mostly empty despite the region struggling for hospital space, whilst distracting from the problems China was having setting up the makeshift hospitals in existing buildings that they've ended up relying on. This only works in a country like China with a tightly muzzled press because journalists would see through it elsewhere.

bangboombang• 6 years ago

Yeah sure, they waste money on building these things and then not bother to put people in there for quarantine.

Great that these claims always come with no links to any halfway credible source.

Just like a few days ago this guy claiming in another thread that the hospitals weren't actually newly built but just some re-purposed resort facilities, with the construction videos being fake. Suuure.

peteretep3• 6 years ago

Unpopular opinion: the long term benefits to Japan -- in particular -- of having a virus that mostly kills old people are substantial.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

Economies are for the benefit of the people. The point of the economy is to enable long, comfortable and happy lives as best we can. The system is not perfect but we have none better.

Seeing any sort of win in an improvement in the metrics because of mass deaths is putting the cart before the horse. The point of a thriving economy is specifically to prevent that sort of thing.

peteretep3• 6 years ago

The point of the economy is to enable long, comfortable and happy lives as best we can

Comfortable and happy, yes, but I can assure you That nobody who is dead has any opinion on how long their life was

Razengan2• 6 years ago

Even edgier opinion: The long term benefits to the entire planet of having a virus that kills most people worldwide are substantial.

The elites who can afford to live comfortably in quarantined bunkers for years will be the only ones left, and they'll remake the world in their image without having to worry about the riff raff.

Solitary corporate overlords with armies of AI drones controlled from a StarCraft-like console, to keep the slaves in line until they finish building their personal pyramid spaceships.

xvilka• 6 years ago

The Justar Journal[1] book series basically.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/169314-the-justar-journal

spicymaki• 6 years ago

The elites are only elite due to the riff raff. They depend on each other. My take on this is that the uber-elites will move the goal post segregating the elites into a new set of upper and lower classes. The cycle of greed, hatred, and delusion will thus continue ad infinitum.

paganel• 6 years ago

Afaik the elites already have an average lifespan higher by 10 or so years compared to normal people, am on mobile and so I’m too lazy to search for links but the information is easy enough to find.

euske• 6 years ago

There are more realistic threats to elderly people in Japan: poverty and loneliness. They are lethal and getting only worse.

Razengan2• 6 years ago

Loneliness is a threat to any modern society, after it has conquered basic survival and comforts, for that is when the pointlessness of existence sets in.

peteretep3• 6 years ago

Poverty and loneliness are terrible. Being dead is fine because nobody who is dead is unhappy about the fact that they’re dead.

Grue3• 6 years ago

A lot of old people in Japan are working their whole life. Farmers tend to be quite old in particular.

jdshaffer• 6 years ago

I live in Japan, and the people here are definitely being cautious, but apart from the local stores being sold out of masks, not much has changed so far. (And here's hoping for the best!)

jsemrau• 6 years ago

Likely the Japanese response is not cautious enough. The virus seems to spread fast. However, its lethalness is likely overrated.

Merrill3• 6 years ago

As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases. For China outside of Hubei, the ratio is 0.55%.

Of course, these are raw figures, and the lower ratio outside of Hubei may be simply due to the cases being newer and that more of the current cases will ultimately be fatal.

https://www.globaltimes.cn//content/1177737.shtml

One of the things needed is a quick and inexpensive test for antibodies to COVID-19 virus in order to establish how many actual infections there are.

tkgally3• 6 years ago

I can second that. While more people are wearing masks than usual and Chinese tourists have nearly disappeared, things seem otherwise unchanged. I'm sitting in a cafe a few steps from the Hachiko Crossing in Shibuya right now—half past eight on Saturday evening—and it's full of cheerful, chatting people. But I'm sure most people are concerned about how things might play out in the days and weeks ahead.

Edit: Sunday --> Saturday

maxerickson• 6 years ago

It Saturday.

kalium_xyz• 6 years ago

Im not noticing anything either, considering finding some way to ban corona virus from my feed but they keep changing the relevant terms to get trough.

Unrelated: You go to any meetups in tokyo?

oxymoran• 6 years ago

If it’s possibly being spread in the community and can take 14 days for symptoms to emerge, shouldn’t it be quite alarming that people are still congregating in public like nothing is wrong?

apotheosis-neko• 6 years ago

From my count there has been nearly a dozen large companies in Tokyo alone 'going remote' the past few weeks. Nearly 500k workers suddenly have the option to work from a satellite office or home.. Alcohol hand sanitizer at the entrance of nearly all events and people requested to wear masks. Think they are being fairly cautious. Definitely not a mask scale panic though! :)

deorder• 6 years ago

Shouldn't it be "as SARS-Cov-2 spreads" or "as more people get COVID-19"?

I see a lot of headlines using COVID-19 as if it is the virus and not the disease caused by it. Probably just semantics, but something I noticed.

kgwgk3• 6 years ago

The disease spreads together with the virus, doesn’t it?

Edit: I mean that it is standard usage to talk about diseases like gastroenteritis, tuberculosis and malaria spreading. One does not need to use “spread” only for the virus/bacteria/parasite.

escape_goat2• 6 years ago

Naming a virus after a disease is rather more monstrous than naming a disease after a virus, but nonetheless the virus is exclusively responsible for the causing and the spreading of the disease. In this particular epidemic, the risk of asymptomatic transmission makes the distinction more salient than it usually is.

mantap• 6 years ago

The authorities have completely fucked up the naming. No news outlet can call it SARS-CoV-2 as it will create panic as SARS has a higher death rate. So you are left with the hypercorrect use of COVID-19 over the actually correct use of "coronavirus".

Number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises in Japan

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