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Remember that fucking USA Military spread COVID to WUHAN during WUHAN's 7th World Military Games sports event, Japs still FOOLISHLY DREAMING to continue with Olympic. Fucking CB 一厢情愿， 掩耳盗铃，不知自量，不知死！
If Olympics were NOT CANCELLED, there will be many SICK & DEAD Athletes, fucking CHILDISH AND NAIVE & SELFISH & SILLY & IGNORANT!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opinion/coronavirus-japan-abe.html
Japan Can’t Handle the Coronavirus. Can It Host the Olympics?
How leaders’ sense of entitlement breeds indifference and incompetence.
By Koichi Nakano
Mr. Nakano is a political scientist.
The inadequacy of the government’s response was exposed by the unmitigated epidemiological and public relations disaster that was the saga of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, shown here in Yokohama on Feb. 21.Credit...Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
TOKYO — The Japanese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak has been staggeringly incompetent. Why, when so much is at stake for Japan, especially as the host country of the Olympics this summer?
The first infection in Japan was confirmed on Jan. 28. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be “a public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30. But it took until Feb. 17 for the Health Ministry of Japan to even inform the public about when, where and how to contact government health care centers in case of a suspected infection. And it was only this Tuesday that the government finally adopted a “basic policy” for responding to the outbreak — which essentially boiled down to asking people to stay home. As of Wednesday, there were 847 confirmed cases of Covid-19 (and six deaths) in or just offshore of Japan.
Medical professionals are running short of face masks, disinfectant and test kits — and Japan is running short of medical professionals who can perform diagnostic tests. Yet so far Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has rejected the opposition’s demand to increase the budget currently under discussion in Parliament, or the Diet, to help tackle the outbreak; he has said it was premature to assume that the existing budget reserve will be insufficient.
And so the Japanese people have been told not to seek testing, nor bother visiting medical institutions unless their symptoms are severe and lasting. Mr. Abe has, in effect, outsourced the government’s containment efforts to the population itself, while the state concentrates limited resources on the severely ill and makes little effort to increase those resources. He might also have been thinking: With no test, there can be no rise in confirmed cases either.
The inadequacy of the government’s response was laid bare by the unmitigated epidemiological and public relations disaster that was the saga of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. After a 14-day quarantine, at least 634 passengers and crew members (out of a total of 3,645 people) were confirmed to have been infected aboard the ship. “We’re in a petri dish,” one passenger said. “It’s an experiment. We’re their guinea pigs.”
Since people started leaving the ship on Feb. 19, confirmed cases among them have been reported in the United States, Australia, Israel and Britain. Whereas those countries placed returning passengers under another 14-day period of isolation, Japan simply released all Japanese nationals from the boat — and at least one of them later tested positive for Covid-19. Twenty-three passengers, most of them Japanese, were also accidentally allowed to go without having undergone mandatory medical tests.
Astonishingly, the Japanese government released without a test more than 90 officials who boarded the ship during the quarantine, even though four had already tested positive — and this, according to one report, because of concern that “they won’t be able to fulfill their official duties if found positive.” The Health Ministry has since agreed to test 41 officials, but it still won’t test any medical professionals and quarantine officers who were on board, on grounds that “they had taken sufficient precautions” themselves.
As some observers have pointed out, a measure of denial and inertia is at play. The Japanese bureaucracy is notoriously dominated by a culture of “kotonakare shugi” (literally, “no-problem-ism”), which prioritizes stability and conformity, and shuns anything that might rock the institutional boat. Sound the alarm about an impending crisis and you might be blamed for causing it.
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Image
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaking during a special gathering in Tokyo to manage the coronavirus outbreak. He is said to be spending only minutes on average at meetings of a dedicated task force he presides. Credit...Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Abe’s cabinet set up a task force of ministers to handle the novel coronavirus on Jan. 30, but for many days that group was primarily focused on the situation unfolding in China, particularly on evacuating Japanese nationals from Wuhan, the city at the source of the initial outbreak. As recently as Feb. 13, Japan’s health minister was still saying that more information was necessary “from an epidemiological standpoint to say infections are growing across the country.” Two days later, though, he finally acknowledged that Japan has entered a “new phase” of the outbreak, and now was emphasizing the need to test people and treat the seriously ill. The day after that was the first time the task force convened its panel of experts to seek advice about the conditions in Japan and what measures should be taken.
Why is Mr. Abe — who is no stranger to an authoritarian style of leadership and readily breaks rules and conventions, as well as, arguably, the Constitution, to get his way — not doing more, or more decisively?
The answer might simply be: out of a lack of interest, personal and political. When the expert panel finally gathered on Feb. 16, Mr. Abe addressed it for just three minutes and then spent the rest of the day at home. The task force has met 13 times, but according to the opposition, the prime minister has been seen in attendance a mere 12 minutes on average.
The day after the first Japanese death from Covid-19 was reported, Mr. Abe was at a task force meeting for eight minutes, and then spent nearly three hours at dinner with the chairman and the president of Nikkei, the media organization. Shinjiro Koizumi, the environment minister and a rising star in the ruling party, skipped a task force meeting altogether to attend a New Year’s party with supporters from his constituency.
This is not the first time that Mr. Abe and his entourage display callous indifference in the face of an unfolding disaster. During the summer of 2018, the prime minister and his ruling-party colleagues came under fire for wining and dining in Tokyo during a bout of torrential rains in western Japan that ultimately killed more than 220 people. From the heavy snow that buried and paralyzed Yamanashi in central Japan in 2014 to Faxai and Hagibis, typhoons that devastated parts of eastern Japan last year, the Abe government has often been criticized for exerting far too little leadership to protect the people.
Once again, as Japan struggles to respond to Covid-19, Mr. Abe is largely invisible. Perhaps he — much like President Xi Jinping appears to be doing in China — wants to keep his distances from the crisis for fear of being held responsible for its consequences. But there is another explanation, both simpler and more systemic.
The Japanese government today is dominated by third- and fourth-generation descendants of long political dynasties, who inherited such important assets as name recognition, dedicated electoral machines, ample tax-exempt campaign funds and vast networks of cronies and special interest groups. Both the prime minister and the deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, are the grandchildren of former prime ministers; Mr. Koizumi, the environment minister, is the son of an ex-prime minister; the defense minister, Taro Kono, is the son of a former deputy prime minister.
Mr. Abe owes his premiership to the accident of birth rather than the democratic will of the Japanese people.
More than one-third of the lawmakers from his Liberal Democratic Party are hereditary politicians. Mr. Abe, who first was prime minister in 2006-7, won back the presidency of the L.D.P. in September 2012 — soon before the party won the election that propelled him to the premiership again — even though the preferences of rank-and-file party members placed him a distant second out of five candidates for the position. (He won because the views of members who are parliamentarians are weighted more.) His current cabinet of 19 ministers counts five sons or grandsons of former members of the Diet; another three have relatives who were lawmakers. The Japanese government is a privileged club of hereditary politicians and their opportunistic sycophants, and a comforting echo chamber.
Japan’s leaders are so out of touch with the lives of ordinary people that they seem genuinely uninterested in their plight. That, in turn, allows an entire bureaucracy to wallow in denial, even over a crisis like the coronavirus outbreak and just a few months away from the Olympics.
Related
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Political Houdini, Can’t Escape Coronavirus Backlash
March 5, 2020
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...als-refuse-coronavirus-patients/#.Xo2egfFS-V4
Health minister Katsunobu Kato speaks at a news conference Tuesday on basic policies for handling COVID-19 infections. | KYODO
National
Hospitals in Japan refusing to test many who suspect they have COVID-19
Experts say strict testing requirements leave institutions confused about who to check
JIJI
Some medical institutions in Japan have been rejecting possible COVID-19 patients under the strict but ambiguous testing guidelines currently in place, leaving many patients shunted from hospital to hospital.
Experts point out that the vague criteria have caused confusion among medical staff.
According to the health ministry, eligibility for the test is limited to two groups of people: those who have come into close contact with patients confirmed as infected with the new virus, and those who have traveled recently to infected areas in China, have a fever of at least 37.5 degrees Celsius and have pneumonia-like symptoms that require hospitalization.
But the final decision on whether to test a patient is also “up to the doctor’s overall judgment.”
A government worker in his 30s who lives in Tokyo visited a hospital after his temperature rose to 39 degrees on Feb. 17. When he mentioned that he had recently visited Taiwan, he was advised to go to a dedicated COVID-19 consultation center.
RELATED STORIES
“I suppose it couldn’t be helped” with the ongoing spread of the virus, he said.
A 29-year-old male company employee in Tokyo called the COVID-19 consultation center after developing a fever of 39 degrees on Feb. 12 as well as feeling lethargic and having diarrhea. He had recently been in contact with a person who had traveled to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The center told him to visit a local hospital because he had not had close contact with the individual with Wuhan travel history. He was then refused by a hospital in Tokyo, but was later able to see a doctor at a hospital that specializes in treating infections.
Symptoms of infection with the novel coronavirus may be difficult to distinguish from those of other illnesses, and it is said that most cases of infection do not become severe.
“It’s likely that many people have recovered without even realizing they’d been infected,” said an official at a disease control authority in Chiba Prefecture.
A Chiba woman in her 70s who on Feb. 20 was found to have been infected had previously been told to note her symptoms, but had not been tested. She had gone on a three-day bus tour ending Feb. 18, but the symptoms continued and so she visited the hospital and then tested positive.
Suggesting one reason so many hospitals have been refusing patients, a Tokyo Metropolitan Government official said, “Medical institutions are probably overreacting,” fearing the risks of in-hospital infection.
“There seems to be confusion among medical staff because the wording of the virus test criteria, ‘up to the doctor’s comprehensive judgment,’ is unclear,” the official added.
Masahiro Kami, a physician and head of the nonprofit Medical Governance Research Institute, said that almost every day he sees patients who are suspected of having the coronavirus but cannot be tested because their symptoms are mild.
“The current criteria, that only people with severe symptoms can be tested, is not appropriate,” Kami said. “The government lacks the perspective of responding to patients’ anxieties.”
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KEYWORDS
medicine, health, hospitals, MHLW, covid-19
17 new cases of mystery virus reported in China
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If Olympics were NOT CANCELLED, there will be many SICK & DEAD Athletes, fucking CHILDISH AND NAIVE & SELFISH & SILLY & IGNORANT!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opinion/coronavirus-japan-abe.html
Japan Can’t Handle the Coronavirus. Can It Host the Olympics?
How leaders’ sense of entitlement breeds indifference and incompetence.
By Koichi Nakano
Mr. Nakano is a political scientist.
- Feb. 26, 2020
The inadequacy of the government’s response was exposed by the unmitigated epidemiological and public relations disaster that was the saga of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, shown here in Yokohama on Feb. 21.Credit...Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
TOKYO — The Japanese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak has been staggeringly incompetent. Why, when so much is at stake for Japan, especially as the host country of the Olympics this summer?
The first infection in Japan was confirmed on Jan. 28. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be “a public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30. But it took until Feb. 17 for the Health Ministry of Japan to even inform the public about when, where and how to contact government health care centers in case of a suspected infection. And it was only this Tuesday that the government finally adopted a “basic policy” for responding to the outbreak — which essentially boiled down to asking people to stay home. As of Wednesday, there were 847 confirmed cases of Covid-19 (and six deaths) in or just offshore of Japan.
Medical professionals are running short of face masks, disinfectant and test kits — and Japan is running short of medical professionals who can perform diagnostic tests. Yet so far Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has rejected the opposition’s demand to increase the budget currently under discussion in Parliament, or the Diet, to help tackle the outbreak; he has said it was premature to assume that the existing budget reserve will be insufficient.
And so the Japanese people have been told not to seek testing, nor bother visiting medical institutions unless their symptoms are severe and lasting. Mr. Abe has, in effect, outsourced the government’s containment efforts to the population itself, while the state concentrates limited resources on the severely ill and makes little effort to increase those resources. He might also have been thinking: With no test, there can be no rise in confirmed cases either.
The inadequacy of the government’s response was laid bare by the unmitigated epidemiological and public relations disaster that was the saga of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. After a 14-day quarantine, at least 634 passengers and crew members (out of a total of 3,645 people) were confirmed to have been infected aboard the ship. “We’re in a petri dish,” one passenger said. “It’s an experiment. We’re their guinea pigs.”
Since people started leaving the ship on Feb. 19, confirmed cases among them have been reported in the United States, Australia, Israel and Britain. Whereas those countries placed returning passengers under another 14-day period of isolation, Japan simply released all Japanese nationals from the boat — and at least one of them later tested positive for Covid-19. Twenty-three passengers, most of them Japanese, were also accidentally allowed to go without having undergone mandatory medical tests.
- Unlock more free articles.
Astonishingly, the Japanese government released without a test more than 90 officials who boarded the ship during the quarantine, even though four had already tested positive — and this, according to one report, because of concern that “they won’t be able to fulfill their official duties if found positive.” The Health Ministry has since agreed to test 41 officials, but it still won’t test any medical professionals and quarantine officers who were on board, on grounds that “they had taken sufficient precautions” themselves.
As some observers have pointed out, a measure of denial and inertia is at play. The Japanese bureaucracy is notoriously dominated by a culture of “kotonakare shugi” (literally, “no-problem-ism”), which prioritizes stability and conformity, and shuns anything that might rock the institutional boat. Sound the alarm about an impending crisis and you might be blamed for causing it.
Editors’ Picks
Stop Trying to Be Productive
They All Retired Before They Hit 40. Then This Happened.
What New York Looked Like During the 1918 Flu Pandemic
Image
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaking during a special gathering in Tokyo to manage the coronavirus outbreak. He is said to be spending only minutes on average at meetings of a dedicated task force he presides. Credit...Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Abe’s cabinet set up a task force of ministers to handle the novel coronavirus on Jan. 30, but for many days that group was primarily focused on the situation unfolding in China, particularly on evacuating Japanese nationals from Wuhan, the city at the source of the initial outbreak. As recently as Feb. 13, Japan’s health minister was still saying that more information was necessary “from an epidemiological standpoint to say infections are growing across the country.” Two days later, though, he finally acknowledged that Japan has entered a “new phase” of the outbreak, and now was emphasizing the need to test people and treat the seriously ill. The day after that was the first time the task force convened its panel of experts to seek advice about the conditions in Japan and what measures should be taken.
Why is Mr. Abe — who is no stranger to an authoritarian style of leadership and readily breaks rules and conventions, as well as, arguably, the Constitution, to get his way — not doing more, or more decisively?
The answer might simply be: out of a lack of interest, personal and political. When the expert panel finally gathered on Feb. 16, Mr. Abe addressed it for just three minutes and then spent the rest of the day at home. The task force has met 13 times, but according to the opposition, the prime minister has been seen in attendance a mere 12 minutes on average.
The day after the first Japanese death from Covid-19 was reported, Mr. Abe was at a task force meeting for eight minutes, and then spent nearly three hours at dinner with the chairman and the president of Nikkei, the media organization. Shinjiro Koizumi, the environment minister and a rising star in the ruling party, skipped a task force meeting altogether to attend a New Year’s party with supporters from his constituency.
This is not the first time that Mr. Abe and his entourage display callous indifference in the face of an unfolding disaster. During the summer of 2018, the prime minister and his ruling-party colleagues came under fire for wining and dining in Tokyo during a bout of torrential rains in western Japan that ultimately killed more than 220 people. From the heavy snow that buried and paralyzed Yamanashi in central Japan in 2014 to Faxai and Hagibis, typhoons that devastated parts of eastern Japan last year, the Abe government has often been criticized for exerting far too little leadership to protect the people.
Once again, as Japan struggles to respond to Covid-19, Mr. Abe is largely invisible. Perhaps he — much like President Xi Jinping appears to be doing in China — wants to keep his distances from the crisis for fear of being held responsible for its consequences. But there is another explanation, both simpler and more systemic.
The Japanese government today is dominated by third- and fourth-generation descendants of long political dynasties, who inherited such important assets as name recognition, dedicated electoral machines, ample tax-exempt campaign funds and vast networks of cronies and special interest groups. Both the prime minister and the deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, are the grandchildren of former prime ministers; Mr. Koizumi, the environment minister, is the son of an ex-prime minister; the defense minister, Taro Kono, is the son of a former deputy prime minister.
Mr. Abe owes his premiership to the accident of birth rather than the democratic will of the Japanese people.
More than one-third of the lawmakers from his Liberal Democratic Party are hereditary politicians. Mr. Abe, who first was prime minister in 2006-7, won back the presidency of the L.D.P. in September 2012 — soon before the party won the election that propelled him to the premiership again — even though the preferences of rank-and-file party members placed him a distant second out of five candidates for the position. (He won because the views of members who are parliamentarians are weighted more.) His current cabinet of 19 ministers counts five sons or grandsons of former members of the Diet; another three have relatives who were lawmakers. The Japanese government is a privileged club of hereditary politicians and their opportunistic sycophants, and a comforting echo chamber.
Japan’s leaders are so out of touch with the lives of ordinary people that they seem genuinely uninterested in their plight. That, in turn, allows an entire bureaucracy to wallow in denial, even over a crisis like the coronavirus outbreak and just a few months away from the Olympics.
Related
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Political Houdini, Can’t Escape Coronavirus Backlash
March 5, 2020
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2...als-refuse-coronavirus-patients/#.Xo2egfFS-V4
National
Hospitals in Japan refusing to test many who suspect they have COVID-19
Experts say strict testing requirements leave institutions confused about who to check
JIJI
- Feb 26, 2020
Article history
- SHARE
Some medical institutions in Japan have been rejecting possible COVID-19 patients under the strict but ambiguous testing guidelines currently in place, leaving many patients shunted from hospital to hospital.
Experts point out that the vague criteria have caused confusion among medical staff.
According to the health ministry, eligibility for the test is limited to two groups of people: those who have come into close contact with patients confirmed as infected with the new virus, and those who have traveled recently to infected areas in China, have a fever of at least 37.5 degrees Celsius and have pneumonia-like symptoms that require hospitalization.
But the final decision on whether to test a patient is also “up to the doctor’s overall judgment.”
A government worker in his 30s who lives in Tokyo visited a hospital after his temperature rose to 39 degrees on Feb. 17. When he mentioned that he had recently visited Taiwan, he was advised to go to a dedicated COVID-19 consultation center.
RELATED STORIES
- Japan rolls out policies aimed at containing mass infection
- Critics ask 'Where's Abe?' as coronavirus spreads in Japan
- Tokyo Olympics will most likely go ahead as planned, but coronavirus could still damage attendance
- Japan's opposition ramps up attacks on Abe's administration over handling of COVID-19 outbreak
- Hokkaido announces prefecture's first COVID-19 fatality
“I suppose it couldn’t be helped” with the ongoing spread of the virus, he said.
A 29-year-old male company employee in Tokyo called the COVID-19 consultation center after developing a fever of 39 degrees on Feb. 12 as well as feeling lethargic and having diarrhea. He had recently been in contact with a person who had traveled to the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The center told him to visit a local hospital because he had not had close contact with the individual with Wuhan travel history. He was then refused by a hospital in Tokyo, but was later able to see a doctor at a hospital that specializes in treating infections.
Symptoms of infection with the novel coronavirus may be difficult to distinguish from those of other illnesses, and it is said that most cases of infection do not become severe.
“It’s likely that many people have recovered without even realizing they’d been infected,” said an official at a disease control authority in Chiba Prefecture.
A Chiba woman in her 70s who on Feb. 20 was found to have been infected had previously been told to note her symptoms, but had not been tested. She had gone on a three-day bus tour ending Feb. 18, but the symptoms continued and so she visited the hospital and then tested positive.
Suggesting one reason so many hospitals have been refusing patients, a Tokyo Metropolitan Government official said, “Medical institutions are probably overreacting,” fearing the risks of in-hospital infection.
“There seems to be confusion among medical staff because the wording of the virus test criteria, ‘up to the doctor’s comprehensive judgment,’ is unclear,” the official added.
Masahiro Kami, a physician and head of the nonprofit Medical Governance Research Institute, said that almost every day he sees patients who are suspected of having the coronavirus but cannot be tested because their symptoms are mild.
“The current criteria, that only people with severe symptoms can be tested, is not appropriate,” Kami said. “The government lacks the perspective of responding to patients’ anxieties.”
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
GET THE BEST OF THE JAPAN TIMES IN FIVE EASY PIECES WITH TAKE 5 PHOTOS
KEYWORDS
medicine, health, hospitals, MHLW, covid-19
17 new cases of mystery virus reported in ChinaChina reported 17 new cases of the mysterious SARS-like virus on Sunday, including three in a severe condition, heightening fears ahead of the Lunar New Ye
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