TOKYO — Tokyo reported 181 new coronavirus cases Thursday, setting another record daily increase.
The total exceeds 1,500, with infections accelerating in the Japanese capital under a state of emergency.
Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike urged companies to more quickly shift to remote working and cooperate with the stay-at-home request.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently declared the state of emergency in Tokyo and six other prefectures, allowing Koike and other leaders to take tougher steps to ensure social distancing. He urged the people to reduce human interactions by as much as 80%, a level that experts say can help control the outbreak in about a month if strictly observed.
Many people still commuted to work Thursday. Japanese companies have been slow to allow their employees to work remotely. Subway operators say their ridership was less than half. But mobile phone carriers showed crowd sizes in downtown Tokyo were only reduced by 30-40%.
On Wednesday, Japan had 4,768 confirmed cases and 96 deaths.
The numbers aren’t too bad quite yet-- hovering around the 2% deaths-to-confirmed cases ratio.
But Tokyo is another NYC on the brink-- in terms of density of its populace.
Do think Japan’s proximity to PPE manufacturing-- and the fact that I’ve found N95 masks for sale online throughout-- since late-February. Leads me to think it might not be allowed to rampage as the virus did-- and is still-- in NYC.
Remember, there is a direct correlation between population density and infection levels.
Tokyo is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, so dense that it is said that all the residents of Tokyo cannot stand on the streets at the same time as there is not enough space.
Luckily, wearing of face masks is a long-standing cultural norm in Japan (also an amazing clean country obsessed with cleanliness) so this should hopefully mitigate infection rates.
and they went fast and early closing schools and business’
All this talk about “Flatening curves” coupled with the daily Gaslighting hour and the daily bullshit shoveling on Faux is going to have the rubes ignoring the separation
Watch for another uptick in cases , Coming to a Red State or Red district near you
Compare subway ridership over time in Tokyo to the same period in NYC, if I recall Josh’s numbers anyway near correctly, and closing the school so quickly it seems they are taking this seriously. It will be interesting to see if they can learn form New York’s mistakes and stay in control.
A lot of those red states will be totally fucked. The refusal to take the Medicaid expansion has helped ruin what healthcare system they had and ignoring social distancing will result in a MAGA disaster.