Space Cochonne comments

They should send them to Osaka indeed. It is a nice thing to help India but you need to protect your own people before starting to help others.

The big drop is coming earlier than expected.

Perfect, another high number tomorrow and we will be all set for the GW drop. Low testing will ensure we have an illusion of a full virus retreat before lifting the SOE. Though the smile on the face will probably not last long.

Ok but I thought that Japan was already over promising on the medical staffs they can have to support the Olympics so I wonder how they can accelerate vaccination in parallel

due to the shortage of hospital that can have covid19 patients everything collapse in Tokyo and Osaka as soon as 100 people needs an ICU but yet by July an army of doctors and nurses will pop up to vaccinate us and take care of the athletes.

https://japantoday.com/category/sports/tokyo-seeks-10-000-medical-staff-for-olympics-despite-virus-surge

The first and most important step the government should be taking pre GW is telling people not to travel between prefectures.

they are telling people not to but I am not sure it will be followed especially for people that already booked. But yes as another poster mentioned yesterday this will become a stealth GoTo Travel as people will move to other prefectures. We will have TV interview on big transportation hub saying « oh well but I already booked and gouvernement announcement came too late »

I suppose testing will also drop during GW so I wonder if they will be able to read any clear trend by 11th of May.

quite a challenge if the vaccination needs to be done with the 2 shots vaccine.

Closing elementary and junior high schools will cause enormous problems for working and single parents, as it did last year. Children that young have to be supervised to make sure they pay attention to the teacher.

Having been through that last year, the worst would be if they close kinder garden and primary school ( so kids 1-6 years old ), which doesn't seem to be the case here, otherwise with both working parents one has to basically be off all day long. I just thought they might as well as go for online classes for high school and university students.

And hey... YOU are to blame for this, Governor. Remember that push to open earlier than Tokyo? 

Exactly, this shouldn’t be coming as à surprise. We knew that end of SOE would be interpreted as « party people » by many locals...

Great news however according to some internal source of mine Tokyo Olympics asked 100% of their staff to be back physically working in the office everyday as soon as the SOE is lifted.

1 step forward then 2 step backs.

But the number of seriously hill is not decreasing, it is more complicated to hide those one.

as for the olympics, a quick look at Australia Open fiasco says it all

A couple of national Hollidays this month will help bringing the number further down.

We can’t really compare Australia and Japan. Anyway numbers are numbers, indeed the drop is surprising considering train, low remote work and mall being quite packed. One possibility is that they did reduce contact tracing testing, we see less case but there are more serious case and the situation in hospitals is still serious. Hence the reason why government is announcing they will postpone the SOE until 7th March. At least this kill the conspiracy about SOE bing lifted in time to get an army of Chinese tourist in Japan to enjoy new year.

Just like in Hiroshima with their 800,000 tests?

Oh, after nearly 2 weeks they're still considering...

Exactly what I was thinking, we had those type of mass testing announces / asserting the real extent from the virus for months. Super fast testing using robots as well, so it does start to sound like propaganda.

Well it is a technology showcase anyway so that’s good. It is very rare to see innovation presented in the CES making it to the consumers. It is a bit like concept car in automotive show.

Yes number are probably going to go down and up again from middle of next week. Then...are we going to get a new alert level ? A new color for the Tokyo tower ? Koike on TV in a hazmat suit ?

Concretely how is different from the previous situation ? Now Japanese who fly back to japan will also need to quarantine, for foreigner the impact is for short business trip but not sure there were that many ( and I read Japan will keep them going with Thailand / Vietnam / Taiwan etc..). The situation is not practical at all but this announcement seems Iike being as important as the rainbow bridge turning red at night.