Did Japan miss its chance to keep the coronavirus in check?

Abstract

He has become known in Japan as the “80% uncle ” Over the past several weeks, Hokkaido University epidemiologist Hiroshi Nishiura has given innumerable TV and newspaper interviews urging the public to reduce social contact by 80% in order to reverse the suddenly explosive growth of Japan’s COVID-19 epidemic “Cooperate to reduce contacts immediately in a drastic manner,” Nishiura keeps saying He often points to a graph showing results from his modeling indicating that Japan’s outbreak can only be contained if people drastically and immediately limit their interactions with others If they used to have contact with 10 people a day, they have to cut that to two, he says Japan’s government is hoping people will listen Confirmed case numbers remain relatively low, but are rising at an alarming rate On 15 March, Japan had an official cumulative total of 780 cases;as of 19 April, that number had soared to more than 10,700, 3000 of them in Tokyo “Tokyo and other big cities are already entering an explosive phase and other areas in Japan are also following that path,” says Kenji Shibuya, a global health scholar at King’s College London He and others blame a containment strategy that focused on known infection clusters but limited access to testing, allowing individual cases to escape surveillance