N.M. comments

@Vinke As long as the spectator limit is set to 1/3 or at least 1/2 of the full capacity.

Following logic, it should be at most 1/3.

The goal is to force social distancing, but having only one seat empty every two seats is meaningless if the row behind and in front of you are also half occupied: those people would be too close to the other in front or behind. To enforce proper distancing and limit the risk of virus transmission, there are only two configurations:

-- either one seat every two seats on an used row is occupied, and one full row is empty between two rows

or one seat every three seats on a row is occupied, with the next row having the occupied seat shifted one place

That brings the total capacity to between 1/4 and 1/3 max, depending on configurations. Anything higher is just pretending to care.

Japan has secured COVID-19 doses for around 40,000 workers related to the Tokyo Olympics

And yet there are more than 80,000 volunteers and we have been told we should also be able to get the vaccine in that government building. Looks like they were lying, as usual.

40,000 workers + 80,000 volunteers = 120,000 people. At 2,500 doses a day, it will take 48 days minimum for just the first shot and 96 days minimum for both shots being delivered, which puts us way after the end of the Paralympics.

Well done Japan!

@shogun36 Now where's my vaccine coupon, or whatever it's called?

This is also something I don't understand. Why are coupons not send to everyone at once? You still need to register for an appointment so it's not like I would skip the line.

And at the same time there are stories every day where they say not all spots are filled. This is mind boggling. Governments and administration in Japan are really broken, they have no common sense.

With testing being half what it used to be just a week ago. Just in time to end the SOE...

@SandyBeachHeaven your point being?

@Zodiac

Suga, the IOC, Mori and Bill Gates versus the majority of the Japanese people.

You are misrepresenting Bill Gates involvement. He has nothing to do with the Olympics. He merely suggested that IF they were to take place, a rigorous vaccination plan must take place, including in in Third-World nations. Which is another way to say that IF such plan is not carried over, then there is no way they can take place.

As for the reported sentence he might have said "Gates called on Suga to host a successful Summer Games as it would send a strong message to the rest of the world", that's just a way to start a conversation. Gates has no power to decide if the Olympics are going to be held or not, so assuming they will, he was just being polite.

@divinda I hope that's not the case. Because that would mean trading the life of people for econompic or political gain.

No, I think this can be explain more easily: the utter incompetence of the Japanese government at every level. It has been known for years but is now at full display.

@Nato

My income dropped by 35% last year, and the GoTo campaigns made things worse by encouraging potential customers to go out of Tokyo every weekend. Weekends and evenings are peak hours for my business, but sales are already down 30%.

If they shut bars and restaurants and tell everyone to be at home by 8pm that's going to make things even worse.

Which is why the right thing to do would be to close the country completely for 2-3 weeks until all people with mild symptom heal themselves naturally. Then the virus would be virtually gone and the economic activity could restart again.

Countries that are now virus-free did exactly that. But to get the Japanese government to do that would require leadership and there has never been any leader in Japan history, sadly.

What is an elderly doing driving that late into the night?

He must be retired and hence should be in bed at his home, especially during a pandemic.

gender identity disorder

Really Japan? It's not a disease.

They should start by translating this page: https://www.fukushihoken.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/iryo/kansen/coronasodan.html (at least in English and Chinese to cover most foreigners).

It is the most important page during the coronavirus epidemic and it is shameful that it is only available in Japanese.

It doesn't help when journalists or politicians ask the wrong people for advice.

But Satoru Hashimoto, who directs the intensive care division at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, said there's no proof that increasing testing will prevent deaths.

He may be a doctor but he is not an epidemiologist, nor an infectious disease expert. It is not his job and he doesn't have the knowledge or experience to make that decision. On top of that he is definitely lying: countries that have tested more and traced better have been able to control the epidemic and limit the number of fatalities.

Unless it also has 0% alcohol (in which case you better drink water), it is very misleading.

While alcohol is not what is commonly called a carbohydrate, it is more energetic than carbohydrates (7 cal/g for alcohol, 4 cal/g for carbohydrate). And the liver is in fact very efficient at extracting energy from alcohol. On top of that alcohol decreases fat breakdown and can stimulate its synthesis and deposition = weight gain.

In conclusion, if you are concerned about your weight, they you should drop alcohol completely and not consume that kind of product. If you still like alcohol, consider red wine instead (in moderation).

@Monty

And you continuously fail to understand that the numbers are meaningless unless the testing is dramatically increased. If you test only 2000 people you are not going to find 10.000 cases.

Add on top of that the fact that post-mortem tests are very rarely done (if ever), and you get low number of cases and low number of deaths reported.

So by itself there is nothing that can be concluded from those numbers, whichever "side" you are on. However we can look at other countries and see what happened when they increased their testing. Spoiler alert, they found even more cases.

Countries that have correctly implemented measure are almost out of this mess (e.g. New Zealand, Iceland, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and countless others, especially islands). Countries that have denied it existed or that it was dangerous will have slow economic activity for at least one more year (such is the case in Japan).

As it stands, the Olympics will be canceled next year, so will any tourism in countries that still have uncontrollable number of cases (in Japan more than 60% of cases are of unknown origin and untraceable). The impact to the economy (esp; since Japan exports more than it imports) will be very high.

Unfortunately, the current government gave up the science.

Comparing with previous day is meaningless, when will journalist ever learn?

Something more useful is to compare with the same day last week. On August 2nd, they were only 292 new cases, 239 on July 26th. So the trend is going up, the exact opposite of what the article is suggesting.

It also urged them to ventilate classrooms, while properly using air conditioners to lower temperatures.

What about constructing buildings with proper insulation?

Air conditioning in summer and excessive heating in winter just accelerates climate change, meaning each year will get worst than the previous one. (cf HFC and second law of thermodynamics for the scientifically illiterate).

The panel proposed assessing six types of data such as hospital bed occupancy rates, percentage of people testing positive and a weekly tally of newly reported infections per 100,000 people in deciding whether to intensify local responses.

What about just following WHO's guidelines? This has already been discussed by a lot of countries involved in WHO and they decided that more than 5% of positive cases means that more tests are required.

Tokyo has been above 5% of positive cases for a month, yet the testing has barely increased.

And on top of that, they are incapable of doing proper tracing with more than 60% cases from unknown origin and not followed by any effort to trace more.

Sources: their own data at https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/

@Wesley yes because retaliation as you call it which is in fact vengeance is even worse.

May do this, may say that.

Stop talking and do it Koike.

@Speed that is very unlikely. They can't postpone the next games as well.

Let's face it, there is 0% chance the Games will be held next year. Even in the best case scenario or a vaccine being available and the pandemic to have seriously slowed down, it will not have completely disappeared.

Given that the Japanese government has proven to the world that they are incapable of dealing with a small outbreak (no nearly enough testing, and more than 50% or infection routes unknown = no proper tracing), I don't think any country will take the risk to send their athletes or officials.

If Japan wants to be serious about the Olympics, they must first completely contain the spread here. And that implies a form of lockdown and 10 times more testing.

by contracting this virus they’re going to die.

No but you might transmit it to someone who will die of it, or have a long lasting illness because of it.

I was replying to another article (Go To travel campaign) but somehow it got added to this article instead.

@bass4funk Trump supporter detected.

Fauci's advice were always based on what was known at the time. If his advice had been followed, there wouldn't be a need to revise them since the number of cases wouldn't have been that high.

At the start of the pandemic, masks were less necessary that proper lockdown measures. But masks were very important for medical workers so it was better to let them have it.

Masks are only effective if the number of cases is low. When it is high, the best measure is still to refrain from going outside or meeting people.

@Noriyon73

Exactly, this "bonus" system is in fact a "penalty" system where company can reduce salaries of their employees without having to renegociate the contract. I experienced it the first year I was in Japan, where my promised "3-month" bonus became "2-month" and then "1-month" because I started working on the second day of a month and thus that month was not eligible for the calculation of the bonus.

Fortunately, in my current job I asked to have a fixed salary with no bonuses.

Poor choice of words from the author of the article.

"To lift" is ambiguous as it could mean "to increase" (like here) or "to remove" (as in removing a weight figuratively) which is also used in the same article: "Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted a nationwide state of emergency in late May" and has the exact opposite meaning.

I had to read the article carefully to make sure it which one it meant.

With only about 2000 tests per day, which gives a 10 % positive rate, well above the 5 % threshold that the WHO classifies as "concerning". 10% being "caused for alarm", so should we be "alarmed"?

And let's not forget that above 40 % of infection routes are unknown (in other words either voluntarily not tracked, or impossible to track).

And that's from the official numbers: https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/. Who knows what's the real extent of the epidemic in Japan?

@erbaviva if it was a flu, summer weather would have made it disappear. The fact there are still transmission case in June/July should be concerning as it is supposed to be the season with the lowest rate, especially as temperatures rise.

As soon as autumn season arrives, it will increase again and explode during the next winter (where respiratory diseases such as pneumonia are the most dangerous).

At that point, the Olympics should be cancelled, there is no realistic scenario where it would still be possible to hold them. And I say that as a volunteer that was looking forward participating it his first Olympics.

0.1 % on average in Japan, means more than 125.000 cases, putting it at the same level than countries in Europe and way above the official 17.000 cases. The difference with Europe is that, they have tested more, done better tracing, so their official number of cases is much closer to the real number of cases.

With more than 90% of cases undetected in Japan, they should have extended the state of emergency, not stopped it.

Yeah. Let's solve bullying by more bullying. They really have no clues.

@Meiyouwenti January/February is not an issue since that's just one semester away from September.

The issue is with April that is only a quarter away from either January or September. In lots of countries, university credits/grades/exams are based on semester. Having Japan start in April, means exchange student/professor must skip or repeat one quarter. That makes lots of potential exchangees consider other countries before Japan, which is bad for academic progress/conference in Japan.

Fiscal year is irrelevant.