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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Hokkaido, Japan Ended Its Coronavirus State Of Emergency Last Month. This Week It Reimposed It |
| 2020-04-18 |
| [Hot Air]- Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido is home to about 5 million people. When the coronavirus began spreading around the world in February, Hokkaido was the first place in Japan to declare a state of emergency. And that early decision appeared to work. The number of new cases dropped and the emergency order was lifted. When the emergency ended, Hokkaido Gov. Naomichi Suzuki said, "There was no surge of infected patients that led to the collapse of the medical environment. We overcame without the fearful circumstance." In essence, Hokkaido had flattened the curve without overwhelming the health system. The emergency was lifted on March 19 but earlier this week Hokkaido declared a second state of emergency as the number of infections began to climb again: The BBC reports that none of the new cases in Hokkaido come from foreigners, so this isn’t a case of a new outbreak that was imported from abroad. The president of the Japan Institute for Global Health said the lesson is that it’s easy to knock the numbers down through concerted effort but harder to keep them down:
"It is relatively easy to tackle clusters, to contact trace and isolate," says Professor Kenji Shibuya of King’s College London... "The major lesson to take from Hokkaido is that even if you are successful in the containment the first time around, it’s difficult to isolate and maintain the containment for a long period. Unless you expand the testing capacity, it’s difficult to identify community transmission and hospital transmission." |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #2 So, it's asymptomatic carriers - in the traditional meaning. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-04-18 10:48 |
| #1 Ripples in a pond. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2020-04-18 10:40 |