Japan tops global COVID chart, dimming reopening hopes

25 comments

1. Lock border and still ichiban!! 日本すごい！

2. I think this is just related to Japan testing more while other countries testing less.

3. Guess my travel is doomed

4. Japan in the 1800s be like

5. Guess I have to go to Korea then…

6. Clearly the border restrictions are working!

7. It’s all so useless.

8. ナンバーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーワン

9. By not letting anyone in, we’re preventing the spread of covid from Japan to the world.

   Altruistic™

10. I *wish* people would just stop saying “pen”!

11. Look. At. Hospitalizations. Not. Infections.

12. Of course you’re going to be the top if you’re one of the only countries still testing. So many have already given up.

13. it makes me wonder how the EU will take the news when Japan doesnt fully open. deadline was end of aug right?

    how many countries will reciprocate… will be interesting…

14. Low infections -> keep borders closed so infection doesn’t enter!

    High infections -> keep borders closed as we are in an emergency

15. At the risk of offending, the natural conclusion here is that beyond vaccinating as many people as you can there is not much to be done.

16. In all seriousness, when are they going to reopen? In the past few years we’ve had

    -Once the vaccines come out

    -Once we hit 70% double vaccinated

    -Once the booster comes out

    -Once 50% are boosted

    -Once there is this election

    -Once there is that election

    blah blah…where is the offramp!?!?!?

17. I know it’s testing and stuff, but I’m also wondering if it’s a summer thing. All the kids (in Japan) are out if schools doing shit now, people want to travel. Many of my colleagues decided to cancel their plans after the numbers started to rise. I was supposed to travel to Nagoya myself, but that’s probably off the table for me now.

    I probably shouldn’t try to go to USJ during Obon either… sigh.

18. Japan has a lot of people who never had COVID. This latest variant is especially “popular” with those who never had it, so it’s not abnormal that the countries who first escaped it do worse for a while. Same with New Zealand. Some recent numbers from the UK show that the 15% who never had COVID account for 55% of new infections recently.

19. Why is Japan’s omicron so different from other countries?

    Almost every country, even ones that held out with no infections for the whole pandemic, like South Korea and Vietnam had HUGE omicron spikes, SK was most in the world at one point, and of course the US had the biggest omicron spike, but this was all back in Jan and Feb, it quickly went down afterwords.

    This wasn’t the case with Japan, their omicron spike very very slowly ramped down over the past half a year, while it was going down the whole past 6 months, it never really disappeared like other countries had, now suddenly there’s a huge spike again? What’s up with that? Did the wide use of masks slow the rate at which people caught it so much that it extended the spike?

20. Open the country. Stop having it be closed.

21. On the plus side, they can’t blame germ-carrying tourists for the spike.

22. Honest question- do you think Japan simply prefer to be closed? Could Covid simply have been an excuse?

23. [deleted]

24. Japan is unique, that’s why. Any Japanese person will tell you.

25. Japan is probably one of the few countries actually still trying to keep an accurate tally of cases. Back in Canada they are reporting like 4-5k a day when health experts believe the number is closer to 100k

    Japan didn’t get the memo that caring about Covid is so 2021