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How Did Japan Defy the Odds?
The country ended its state of emergency with few new cases and limited restrictions. Is there a takeaway for the United States?
Japan recently ended its state of emergency. According to data from Johns Hopkins, the country has 16,598 confirmed cases and 881 deaths. The number of daily new cases, according to World Health Organization data, peaked at 743 in April and has dropped to between 90 and 14 for the past week, Science reports.
“With this unique Japanese approach, we were able to control this [infection] trend in just 1.5 months; I think this has shown the power of the Japanese model,” said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a press conference.
How the country achieved this without a lockdown (the country doesn’t have the legal ability to implement one) and leaving many businesses open has experts somewhat flummoxed. “Just by looking at death numbers, you can say Japan was successful,” Mikihito Tanaka, a professor at Waseda University, told Bloomberg. “But even experts don’t know the reason.”
There’s a wide variety of suggested reasons for Japan’s success. They include the fact that the country has embraced widespread mask-wearing even before the outbreak, and that the population has a lower level of chronic diseases compared to…
