Corona-zona

  Today's post is by Corona-zona Senior Northeast Asia Correspondent  Kaigai If I were at home in California right now, I would be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The state is awash in vaccines. Increasingly this is the case across the United States, where in the near future anyone who wants to be vaccinated will be. But I’m in Japan, where a significant new COVID-19 wave appears to be accelerating, and I have no idea when my turn will come. All I know for sure is it won’t be anytime soon—even though my age (over 65) is said to qualify me for a fairly early dose. Japan’s vaunted public health system is for real, and people have exceedingly healthy lifestyles here. Lifespans are longer than in all but two other countries.  Unlike the U.S., UK, and much of Western Europe, Japan has done a better job controlling the coronavirus than its industrial peers. Cases and deaths have been way lower. All that is coming undone, or threatens to unravel, as a new surge in cases leav...

  I started this blog one year ago today. Well OK, there were a couple posts in December 2020, but that was a false start. Regular daily posts started on January 6, 2021. That's perhaps an inauspicious birthday because it's the same day T**** directed a treasonous mob to stage an insurrection at the Capitol. Anyway, as it says in the "about the blog," I started it because I was kind of obsessing about the  pandemic and reading all I could about it. The blog functioned as an outlet for all the information I was consuming as I was hunkering down at home, and I thought it might be of some modest help to others. One year ago, I never dreamed that I would still be blogging a year later! Like a lot of other people I was kind of naïve, thinking that with the vaccines coming the Apocalypse would be over in a few of months. Just goes to show how wrong a person can be. I've enjoyed writing all of the posts (284 including this one) I've done. This is a kind of writing ac...