How Bad Are Things in Japan, Really?


Last night on the news I heard/saw rather breathless coverage of how bad the coronavirus outbreak is becoming in Japan. A "frightening spike" in cases according to the BBC. "Record breaking cases" leading to and expanded "state of emergency" according to NPR. One conjures images of Godzilla wreaking havoc on Tokyo.

Everybody has been expecting things to go south over there, given the country's low vaccination rate. A reliable source told me the low rate is partly because the Japanese got started very late with vaccinations. That's because they believe they are "genetically distinct" and wouldn't approve vaccines for use until they had been clinically tested on Japanese people.  M'kay.

Now infections are cranking up just in time for the "2020" Olympics. But how bad are things over there, really?  

Well, no doubt cases are spiking.  Here is a chart from Our World in Data showing the seven-day trailing average over the last month:


Raw cases have increased about 5x from July 1 till yesterday.  The curve is also exponential, meaning the increase each day is greater than the increase the last day. Not good!

But those are raw numbers that describe just Japan.  What if we put it in context by normalizing for population (which are the right numbers whenever we are making comparisons)?

Our World In Data has a helpful interactive widget that you can visit yourself to make comparisons between different countries in confirmed cases per million people. (I tried embedding it in this post but the interactive part wouldn't work.)

Japan's rate is 58.5 per million.  For comparison, Malaysia (507.56) has a rate almost ten times higher.  Thailand (226.5), Indonesia (151.44), and Vietnam (79.49) are all worse.  Philippines (57.01) has about the same rate.

Outside Asia, large Western countries are all multiple times worse than Japan: Spain (509.08), UK (409.93), France (319.74), United States (235.13).  Things are over 4x as bad as Japan here in the home-base of Corona-zona (Arizona, 240 per million).

So things are getting worse in Japan, but their case rates are nothing compared to other places. The reporting seems to be somewhat sensationalistic—something the Biden administration has been complaining about in the U.S. Perhaps the idea is to create some additional drama around an Olympics that is tanking in TV ratings.

Image by Corona-zona

















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